The Painter in Oil, by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

These artist's painting from 1800 to 1909 made use of this transparent Indian Yellow pigment until it was abruptly removed from access by the maker Winsor Newton in 1909; Vigee-LeBrun, David, Friedrich, Ingres, Carot, Delacroix, Rousseau, Millet, Courbet, Whistler, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Eakins, Dagas, Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Sargent, Ostroukhov, Ripin, Serov, Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, Bellows, Savrasov, Pukirev, Perov, Shishkin, Vasilievich, and Polenove. 

1870, COLOR,  Cerulean Blue, opaque, permanent, Cobaltous Stannate, cobalt oxide and tin oxide. 

Don. Here is a better list of the pigments available to the great artists in 1886.

1886-COLOR THE FIRST PUBLIC STANDARD OF PIGMENT COLORS FOR ARTISTS 

Bouguereau never mentions a specific palette, but Moreau-Vauthier is again helpful in this regard; he gives it as:
Naples Yellow (lead antimonate)
Yellow-Ochre
Chrome Yellow, dark
Viridian
Cobalt Blue
White Lead
Light Vermilion
Chinese Vermilion
Mars Brown (iron oxide); this available from Lefranc & Bourgeois Van Dyck Brown
Burnt Sienna
Ivory Black
Bitumen *transparent yellow-brown*
Genuine Rose Madder, dark *transparent magenta*

All of Bouguereau's colors are still available today as prepared artist's paints, but not from any single manufacturer. In one of his sketchbooks, Bouguereau lists so many pigments that no palette could possibly contain them, but it is interesting to note all the possibilities he had to choose from.

1869 [Sketchbook No. 5]

Manganese oil -- Leclerc, rue St. Georges...
White lead, (Silver White) Lead carbonate
Ivory Black, Charred Ivory
Minium, Red Lead
Vermilion, Mercuric sulphide
Brown Madder, Iron (charred) Cassius Red, Tin bioxide and gold protoxide
Iodine Scarlet, (English)Mercuric iodine
Purple Red, Mercuric chromate
Madder Lake,
Mineral Yellow, (Paris) Oxi-chloride of lead
Charred Massicot, Lead bioxide and protoxide
Minium, orange, Charred ceruse (lead)
Chrome, Lead Chromate
Orpiment, (King's Yellow) Arsenic sulphide or Yellow sulphide of arsenic
Naples Yellow, Lead oxide and antimonate
Ochre, Hydrated ferric oxide
Indian Yellow, [?](It was a secret of W/N back than. The principal constituent of Indian yellow is a mixture of the calciun and magnesium salts of euxanthic acid.)
Prussian Blue, Iron protoxide sulphate and prussiate solution
Mineral Blue, Iron and [?]
Ultramarine Blue, Lapis Lazuli
Cobalt, Cobalt
smalt, Powdered cobalt glass
Ash Blue, Copper
Indigo, Vegetable *cyan*
Violet, Charred iron peroxide Cassius, purple and alumina
Verdigris, Copper acetate
Scheele Green, Copper arsenate
Mountain Green, Copper carbonate
Chrome Blue, Chromium protoxide
Cobalt Blue, (mineral) Cobalt and zinc
Viridian, Sulfate of lime and copper aceto-arsenite
Green Earth, silica, iron oxide, potassium, magnesia carbonate and water
Sap Green, Unripe buckthom berries (lake)
Cassel Earth,
Cologne Earth, Natural earth darkened mostly with bitumen
Umber, Natural earth colored with ferric oxide, manganese dioxide plus a little bitumen
Sienna, Ochreous natural earth and manganese(bioxide ?)hydrate
Prussian Brown, Charred Prussian Blue
Asphaltum, Bitumen
Mummy, Asphaltum and bone ash
Yellow Lake, Albumen colored with Avignon yellow grains
Cadmium, Cadmium sulfide
Azure or smalt, *Azurite or * powdered cobalt glass

A Landscape Palette. - Landscape calls for pitch and vibration. You must have pure color and great luminosity, yet a range of color which will permit of all sorts of effects. The following will serve for everything out-of-doors, and I have seen it with practically no change in the hands of very powerful and exquisite painters. There are no browns and blacks in it because the colors which they would give are to be made by mixing the purer pigments, so as to give more life and vibration to the color. The Blackest note may be gotten with ultramarine and rose madder with a little veridian if too purple; the result will be blacker than black, and have daylight in it. The ochre is needed more particularly to warm the veridian. If you paint figures out-of-doors you will need this same palette. Madder carmine or purple madder, and cerulean blue may also usefully added to this list.

WHITE.
STRONTIAN YELLOW.
ORANGE VERMILION.
CADMIUM YELLOW.
PINK MADDER.
ORANGE CADMIUM.
ROSE MADDER.
YELLOW OCHRE.
COBALT.
ULTRAMARINE.
VERIDIAN.
EMERALD GREEN.

The umbrella should be larger and tight, and one such as the illustration, with a valve in the top to let the wind and hot air through, will be found cooler in less easily blown over.
Don. Good tip
You should have some strong rings sewn on to it, so that you can fasten it from four sides by strings, to keep it steady if the wind blows hard. The umbrella should be of light-colored material, preferably white; but if it is lined with black, the shade will be better, and give no false glow to the color.

Don. Good tip. Real pictures grow from study of nature.
There are changes which can be made, and be right - made as nature might make them. Other changes which would be false to nature's ways, and false to art also. For art works through nature always, and in accordance with her.

Don. Good tip.
This is the aim of the painter, to express ideas though nature, not to express notions about nature.
Methods. - Two general methods are at the command of the student from the first, - to study at once from nature, or to copy. I think I may safely claim to speak for the great body of teachers who are also professional artists, in saying that copying is a means of study rather for the advanced student than for the beginner. (Don. I would rather use the current terms, interpreting nature by painting on location. Leave the word copying for copying photographs, which we don't do.)

Don. good tip.
Get to Nature. - If you would really learn to paint, to see for yourself, to represent what you see in your own way, you cannot get to nature too soon. Don't bother about what the thing is, so long it is nature herself. By nature I mean anything, absolutely anything which exists of itself, not painted. Whether it be the living figure, or a cast, or a bit of landscape, or a room interior - all things which actually exist must show themselves by the facts of light falling upon them: the relation of color, and the contrasts of light and dark. Whatever you see is useful to you in this way, for these bring about all the qualities and conditions which you most need to study.

Don. Good tip
Modeling. - In the same way that you have laid out the proportions in mass lay out your Proportions of light and shade. Model your drawing by avoiding the small until the large variations of shade are in place. Avoid seeing curves in relief as you have avoided curves of outline. Try to analyze the modelling into flat planes, each one large enough to give a definite mass of relief. Don't be afraid of an edge in doing this. Let your flat tone come frankly up to the next tone in stop. This again is not for any effective in itself, but only for facility exactness. Later you can loose it as much as you see fit in breaking up the drawing into the more delicate planes, and these again into the most subtle.
Study first the outline and then the planes. Constantly compare them as to relation; you will find it suggestive. Remember that your aim is to produce a whole, not a lot of parts, and although a whole includes the parts, the parts are incidental.

Don. Good tip.
Measurements. - You will always have to use measurements for the sake of accuracy. Probably you will never be able to dispense with them. The best way would be to take them as matter of course, and get so that you make them almost mechanically, without thinking of it. You will save yourself an immense deal of time and trouble by accepting this at once; for accuracy is impossible without measurements, and the habit of accuracy is the greatest time-saver.

Hold your charcoal in your hand freely, so that your thumb can slip along it and mark off parts of the object when you sight at them across the coal. Measure horizontal and vertical proportions into themselves and into each other. Height and breadth are checks to each other. If the height is a certain proportion of the breadth, then the smaller proportions of height must have equivalent proportions to each other as well as to breadth. Measure these and you are sure of being right.

Steps. - Divide your drawing into steps or stages of work. You will find a helpful thing in studying. You will do it quite naturally later. Do it deliberately at first, as a matter of training.
First step. - Measure the extreme height and breadth of the whole group or object of your drawing, with accuracy, and mark each extreme.
Second step. - Outline the great mass of it with the simplest lines possible. Give the general shape of the whole. This block it in.
Third step. - Measure each of the objects in the group, or the parts most prominent, if it be a single object. Measure its height and breadth, both in its own proportion and in proportion to the dimensions of the other parts and of the whole. Enclose it in straight lines as you did with the whole mass.
Fourth step. - Find the more important of the lesser proportions in each object, and block them out also. This should map out your drawing exactly and with some completeness.
Fifth step. - Lay in simple flat tones to fill in these outlines, and keep the relations of light and dark very carefully as you do so.
Sixth step. - This should leave your paper with a few large masses of dark and light, which can now be cut into again with the next smaller masses, giving more refinement to the whole. This also should so break up the edges as to get rid of any feeling of squareness or edginess.
Seventh step. - Put in such accents of dark, or take out such of light, as will give necessary character and force to the drawing.

Chiaroscuro is an Italian compound word whose two parts, chiar and oscuro, signify simply bright and obscure, or light and dark.
Don. 'bright and obscure'. Means the light source is obscure. Like a candle behind a hand or any light source hidden.

Primaries and Secondaries. - As all the other shades of color are produced by the combinations (over-lappings) of the waves or vibrations in the light rays from the primary colors,
Don. He is using the old primaries of Red Yellow and Blue, an isosceles triangle, not like the equilateral triangle of YMC. )
we have a series of colors called secondaries, because they are made up of the rays of any two of the three primaries: as purple, which is a combination of blue and red.

When dealing with light the secondaries are: shades of violet and purple from red and blue; shades of orange red, orange, orange yellow, yellow, and yellowish green from red and green; and bluish green and greenish blue from blue and green - the character of the color being decided by the proportions of the primaries in the mixture.
Don. This is the first attempt to make light RGB behave as pigment.

These conclusions have been reached mainly through experiments in white light. The primaries so obtained do not hold good with pigment, as I have stated, but the principles do.

It will avoid confusion if I speak hereafter of the combinations as they occur with pigment, it being borne in mind that it is a practical fact that we are dealing with rather than a scientific one.

Don. Here I am really against our writer.
In dealing with pigment the primaries are red, blue, and yellow, not green.

Don. The fallacy thinking in RYB as primaries:
"If red yellow and green are the primaries of light, just change the green to yellow and it might work in pigments.."
Below he is going to start..

Of course the secondaries are also changed; and we have purple and violet shades from red and blue, orange from red and yellow; and green from blue and yellow - all of which vary in shade with the proportion of the, mixture of the primaries, as is the case with light.

Don. He has the light primaries right and the pigment primaries wrong. He is using light's RGB blue as the pigment blue. Pigment blue (Ultramarine Blue) is a secondary color on the YMC and RCW Crystal Element Color Wheel, Real Color Wheel, 'RCW' for short.


Tertiaries. - Another class of shades or colors is called tertiary, or third; for they are mixtures of all the three primaries, or of a primary with a secondary which does not result from mixture with that primary.
Tertiaries are all grays, and grays are practically always tertiaries. If you keep this in mind as a technical fact, it will help you in management of color.
Don. That was bad teaching, I remember having to do this drill in college, with the wrong primaries. 1962
Don. Tertiaries are colors all right, colors next to the secondary colors in a 12 color wheel, not a mixture of three primaries.
Grays are, to the painter, always combinations of color which include the three primaries. The usual idea is that gray is more or less of a negation of color. This is not so. Gray is the balancing of all color, so that any true harmony of color, however rich it may be, is always quiet in effect as a whole; that is, grayish -good color is never garish.

Grays made by mixing black with everything are the reverse, and should not be used except when you use black as a color (which it is in pigment), giving a certain color quality to the gray that results from it.
Complementary Colors. - Two colors are said to be complementary to each other when they together contain the three primaries in equal strength.

Don. That's correct, but watch what he does with it and the wrong primaries.

Green, for instance, is the complementary of red, for it contains yellow and blue; orange (yellow and red) is complementary to blue; and purple, (red and blue) is complementary to yellow.

Don. And there you have it, the RYB color theory in the late 1800's. All those complements mix brown, not neutral. All the rest is incorrect, the RYB colorwheel doesn't work. It doesn't contain magenta or cyan.

The Palette. - You try to attain nature's effects of light with pigment. Pigment is less pure than light. You cannot have the same scale,
Don. Yes you can, with the right set of transparent pigment primaries.

Transparent color should not be used alone, but only to modify the tint of the more solid pigments; for the transparent colors used indiscriminately are apt to crack,
Don. Today's transparent colors don't crack.
which characteristic is avoided when the heavier color forms the body of the paint.
Solid Painting. - In most cases solid painting is the safest, -- the least likely to crack, and the most safely cleaned from varnish and dirt without injury to the paint itself. It is firmer in character too, and gives more solidity of effect to the picture.

Mixing. - In mixing colors you should be careful not to over mix. Dont stir your paint. Too much mixing takes the life out of the color. Particles of the pure color not too much broken up by mixing are valuable to your work, giving vibration and brilliancy to it. The reverse is muddiness, which is sure to come from too much fussing and overworking of wet paint. Dont use more than three pigments in one tint if you can help it, and mix them loosely. Put all the colors together, one beside other, drag them together with the brush, scoop them up loosely on the end of it, and lay the tint on freely and frankly. Never muddle the color on the canvas. Dont put one color over another more than you can help; you will only get a thick mass of paint of one kind mixing with a mass of another, and the result will be dirty color, which of all things in painting is most useless.
Don. Here we are out of the classic range, I don't why he concideres himself a student of Bouguereau, he has left behind good classical blending techniques and moved on to Impressionism. Perhaps he even started the movement.

The free use of oil as a thinning vehicle, although it makes possible a greater degree of richness of color, is very likely to turn the picture brown in time. Oil will always eventually have a browning effect on all paints, even when mixed with them as little as is absolutely necessary. If you make a tinted varnish of oil (which is practically what a glaze is), you add so much, to the surely darkening action of the oil on the picture.
Don. Venetian Balsam doesn't yellow like oil and is the basis of a good glaze.

Do not glaze on color which is not well dried. The drying of the under color and the drying of the glaze are apt to be different in point of time, and the picture will crack. If they vehicle is the same as was used in the under-painting and the drying qualities of both paintings are the same, there is no danger. But when color dries, it shrinks and flattens, and two kinds of colors shrinking differently are sure to pull apart, and that causes cracking. If the under-painting is well dry, but not hard and glossy on the surface, and is capable of still absorbing enough of the new colors vehicle to bind the coats together, your glaze will stand. But rather than have it too soft, have the under-painting too hard, and then before you glaze over it with a little thin, quick drying varnish, and glaze into that. The varnish will hold the two coats of paint together.
Don. Better to add mastic to your oil, mastic re-desolves making a better bond. You don't have to wait until it under paint has dried.

Don. Good tip.
Frottées. - Closely akin to the glaze in manner, but very different in use, is the frottée or rubbing. This is generally used on the fresh surface of the canvas, to rub in the light and shade or the first coloring of the picture after the drawing is done. It is one of the safest and wisest ways of beginning your picture. You can either rub in the picture with a frottée of one color, as sienna or umber, or you can use all the colors in their proper places, only using very little vehicle, and making something very thin in tint, somewhat between a glaze and a scumble. You can make a complete drawing in monochrome in this way, or you can lay in all the ground colors of the picture till it has much the effect of a complete painting. Then, as you paint and carry the picture forward, every color you put on will be surrounded with approximately the true relations, instead of being contrasted by a glare of white canvas.
A frottée is a most sympathetic ground to paint over.

CHAPTER XXIV: COPYING
Don. He's talking about copying impressive paintings and studying other's techniques.

Copying may well be spoken of here as it is in a sense a kind of manipulation. It is a means of study to the student, and a useful, sometimes necessary process to the painter. In the transferring of the results of his sketches and studies to the final canvas, the painter must be able to copy, and to know all the conveniences of it. Before the painting begins on a picture, the main figures in it must be placed and drawn on the canvas with reference the plan of it, and their relation to that plan. This calls for some method exact reproduction of the facts stored in the artists studies for that purpose. The process of copying is that method.

This is not the best means of study for a beginner, as I said before. It trains the understanding of processes rather than the eye; and the training of the power of perception rather than understanding of methods is what the young student needs. The processes with which he may put on canvas the effect he sees in nature are secondary matters to him. Let him really see the thing and find his own way of expressing it, clumsily, rudely most probably, it is still the best thing for him. He may take such help as he can find, as he needs it; get such suggestions as the work of good painters can give him, when he cannot sees own way. But the searching of nature should come first. The seeing of what is must precede the stating of it.

An out-door picture may be still painted in the studio, but it must be painted from studies made out-doors. It is no longer possible to pose a model in a studio-light and paint her so into a landscape. It was right to do it when it was done frankly, when the world had not waked up to the fact that things look different in diffused in concentrated lights. It is not right now. You cannot go back of your century. To be born too late is more fatal than to be born too soon.

Don. Don't confuse paintings not done on location from life, with the real thing. There is no connection.

Page 8/10

Don. Good tips.
The painter must always sketch from nature. Only by so doing can he be constantly in touch with her, and received her suggestions unaffected by of multitudinous facts. The sketch reserves for him the evanescent effects of nature, which the study would not so entirely, because not so simply, grasp. The sudden storm approaches; the fleeting cloud shadow; or the last gleam of after-glow; these, as well as the more permanent, but equally charming effects of mass against mass of wood and sky, or of meadow and hill, he can only store up for future use in his sketches.

Dont be afraid of taking measurements. Every one who did anything worth looking at took measurements. Leonardo laid down a complete system of proportions. You cant get your proportions right without measurements, and if your proportions are not right, nothing will be right. Use a plumb-line: use it frequently, and measure horizontals and verticals. If you are in doubt about anything, stop a minute and measure. It takes less time than correcting.

Don. Here starts Parkhurst's painting techniques which I think are great and right on.

Beginning. - The best way to make a study from still life is to begin with a careful charcoal drawing on the canvas.
Don. Good tip, for opaque painters, but for transparent painters who use the ground color as white it's hard to hide the black charcoal without painting everything opaque, over a white ground you don't always have to paint opaquely.
 
The Frottée. - Make, then, a careful light-and-shade drawing with charcoal directly on the canvas, working in the background where it tells against the group, but without carrying it out to the edges of the canvas. Be accurate with your modelling and values, and keep the planes simple and well defined. Draw all characteristic details, but only the most important, nearly as if it were not to be painted, but were to remain a drawing. Fix this drawing with fixative and an atomizer. In beginning with paint go over the drawing with a thin frottée which shall re-enforce the drawing with color. You may do this with one color, making a monochrome painting very thin, leaving the canvas bare for the lights. Many of the best painters lay in all pictures this way. What color is to be used is a matter for consideration. It should be one so sympathetic to the coloring of the whole picture that if it is left without any other paint over it in places it will still look all right.

Raw umber is a good color, or raw umber modified with burnt sienna and black. You can make a mixture that seems right. This establishes your larger values, and gives you something better than a bare canvas, and something with which you can have a more just idea of the effect of each touch of color you put on. If there is much variety of color in the various objects of your composition, it is better to make your frottée suggest the different colors. Instead of making a monochrome frottée, rub in each object with a thin mixture, approximating the color and value, but not solid, nor as strong as it will become when painted, of course. Nevertheless, you can get in this first rubbing in, a strong effect, which at a distance has a very solid look, though the relations are not so carefully studied. When you come to put on solid color with this sort of an under-painting, it is easy to judge pretty closely of color as well as light-and-shade relations, and you can work more frankly into it. Into this painting, when it is dry, you may begin to paint with body color, beginning with the true color and value of the lights, and working down through the half darks into the darks. Paint the background pretty carefully as to color and value, but loosely as to handling. Paint slowly, deliberately, and thoughtfully. There is no need to pile up masses of wrong color. You should try to be sure of the color before you lay it on. Study the color in the group, mix on the palette, and compare them. Think at least two minutes for every one minute of actually laying on paint. You save time in the end by being deliberate and by working thoughtfully. Put on color firmly and with a full brush, but there is no need to load color for the sake of the body of it.

Loaded Light. - It was a principle with the older painters to paint the shadows thinly and with transparent color, and to load the lights. It gave a richness to the shadows and a solidity to the lights which was much valued. But don't think about this; don't let it influence the frankness of your painting. The theory is in itself largely obsolete now, and in fact has been disregarded by almost every able painter who ever lived, in practice, no matter what he said about it. I only speak of it because almost all books on painting have laid it down as a rule, and you had better know its true relation to painting. Like all other traditional methods of painting it has been used by the greatest of painters, and has also been disregarded by the greatest of painters; and as far as you are concerned, you may use it or not as suits your purpose. The main thing is to get the right color and value in the right place, in the most direct and natural, in the least affected, manner possible. You may work into your frottée, then, more or less solidly as you feel will give you the best representation of the color you see.

Solid Painting. - Don't paint always in the same way. It is a mistake to get too accustomed to one manner of procedure. Different things require different handling, Let the thing suggest how you shall paint it. If you want to paint directly, I paint solidly from first to last instead of rubbing in thinly first. But always have an accurate drawing underneath.

In working solidly without previous laying in, begin where each brush-stroke will have the greatest effect toward establishing the appearance of reality. If the canvas is light, begin by putting in the main darks, and if the canvas is dark, do the reverse. You get the most immediate effect of reality by the relief; the relief you get most directly by putting in first those values which contrast with what is already there. Establish your most telling values first, then work from them towards less immediately effective things.

Color and Values. - Study the color at the same time you do the value. Put on no touch of paint as a value or a color alone. If you do, you will have to paint that spot twice, -once for the value, and again for the color. You might as well paint for the two qualities in one stroke. It takes more thought, but it gives you more command of your work. It doesn't load your canvas with useless paint, and it saves time in the long run.
Relations and Directness. - Study to give the true relations of things. Try to get the just color quality. Give it at once. Don't get it half way and trust to luck and a subsequent painting to correct it. You will never learn to paint that way. Paint intensely while you paint. Use all the energy you have. Paint with your whole strength for a half or a whole hour, and then rest. You will accomplish more so than by painting all day in a languid, half-hearted way.

Directness. - Directness comes from making up your mind just what tint of color and value is needed, and just where it is to go, first, then putting it there with no coaxing. Get the right color on your brush and plenty of it; then put the brush deliberately and firmly down in the right place, and take it directly away, and look at the result without touching it again till you have made up your mind that it needs something else, and what it is that it needs. Then do that and stop. Directness and justness of relation are the most important things in painting. They tell for most, result in most, both to the picture and to the student. Whatever you do, work for that. Try to have no vagueness in your mind as to what you will do or why you do it, and the effect of it will show on your canvas.

CHAPTER XXIX: FLOWERS
Flower painting is the refinement of still life. You have the same control of combination, but you have not the same control of time. Flowers will change, and change more rapidly than any other models you can have; and at the same time they are so subtle that the most exquisite truth and justness are necessary to paint them well.
People seem to think that anyone can paint flowers. On the contrary, almost no one can paint them well. There are not a dozen painters in the world who can really paint flowers as they ought to be painted. Why? Because while they are so exquisite in drawing and color, and so infinitely delicate in value, they are also even more infinitely subtle in substance and sentiment.

When you have got the drawing and the color and the value, you have not got the quality.
What is the petal of a flower? It is not paper, and it is not wax, neither is it flesh and blood, of the most exquisite kind. All these are gross as substance compared to the tender firmness of the flower petal; and the whole bunch of flowers is made up of petals.

Yet you cannot paint the petals either, else you lose the flower. You must paint the quality of the petal, and the character of the flower. All these things make the mere perception of facts most difficult, and it must be done with full knowledge that in an hour it will be something else, and you can never get it back to its original form again. Yet you cannot paint a bunch of flowers in an hour. What will you do? Mass and Value. - There is something besides the flower and the petal; there is the mass. The mass is one thing, and it is surrounded with air, and air goes through the interstices of it. You must make this invisible. The difference in value in flowers is something infinitely little, as a great flower painter said to me once. Yet the difference is there. The bunch has its nearer and its farther sides, and the way the light falls on it is the most obvious expression of it.
When you begin a group of flowers, get the whole first. Make up your mind that you cannot complete your work from the flower you have in front of you, and that you must constantly change your models. Do not paint the little things, the personal things first then. Paint what is common to all the flowers in the group first. Paint the mass and the rotundity of it, and express most vaguely the forms of the accents, and of the darks which fall between the flowers, but get their values. For you will have to change these, and you should have nothing there which will influence you to shirk. In this way only can you get the larger things without hampering your future work by what may be wrong.

Get the large values, and as little as possible the expression of individual flowers; then as the flowers fade and change, substitute one or two fresh ones at a time, in this or that part of the partially wilted group, using the same kind of flower as that which was in that place before; then work more closely from these new flowers, letting the whole bunch preserve for you the mass and general relation. As you work, the bunch will be gradually changing and constantly renewed from part to part, and you can work slowly from general to particular. Finally, from new flowers, put in those more individual touches which give the personal flowers.
This is the only way you can work a long time, and it is not easy. But it should not discourage you. Nothing takes the place of the flower picture, and the only way to learn to paint flowers is to paint flowers.
General Principles Hold Always. - Still, the principles of all painting hold here as elsewhere, and what is said of painting in general will have its application to flowers.

Paint flowers because you love them; and if you love them, love them enough to study patiently to express the qualities most worth painting, even if there be difficulties.

Details Again. - Dont make too much of unimportant things. The whole is more than the part; the flower than the petal. Of course you cant paint a flower without painting the petals, but you need not paint the petals so that you cant see anything else. If the character of the flower as a whole is to be seen at a glance without the emphasis of any special petal, suggest the petals only. If the petal is important to the expression of character, then paint it; and if you do, paint it well. Use your judgment; make the less expressive of the greater, or do not paint it at all.

Colors. - Colors and tints in flowers are always more rather than less subtle than you think them. If you have a doubt, make it more delicate - give delicacy the benefit of the doubt. Still, flowers are never weak in color. Subtle as they are, it is the very subtlety of strength. Black will be the most useless color of your palette. Make your grays by mixing your richer colors. A gray in a flower is shadow on rich color, and it must not be painted by negation of color, but by refinement of color.

Sketches. - Make sketches of flowers constantly. Try to carry the painting of a single flower or of a group as far as you an in an hour. Practise getting as much of the effect of detail as possible with as little actual painting of it, and then apply this to your picture.
Get to know your work in studies and sketches, and you will work better more difficult combinations.
When you have, as you generally will have, still-life accessories to your flowers, rub in quickly the color and values of the vase or what not first, but leave the painting of it till the flowers are done. It will be a more patient sitter than they.

Apply the ways of painting spoken of with reference to still life to the sketching of flowers. Either rub in quickly a frottée and then paint solidly into that, and work frankly and solidly but deliberately to render the characteristic qualities. When you sketch flowers don't take too many at a time; calculate your work not more than an hour and a half or two hours, and have no more flowers in your sketch than you can complete in that time. When you sketch, quite as much as when you work at more ambitious canvases, get the mass first, especially if the group is large. Then put in the accents which do most to give the character or type of the flower. Make studies of single flowers and sketches of groups. In the study search detail and modelling; in the sketch search relations and relief, effect and large accent.


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Let your brush follow lines of structure. Don't lay on paint across a cheek, for instance. Notice the direction of the muscle fibre. It is the line of contraction of the muscle which give the anatomical structure to a face. If your brush follows those, you will find that it takes the most natural course of direction.
Do the same with planes of the body and of the clothing. Note the lines of action, and the brush-stroke will naturally follow them.

See that the whole form, and particularly the head, 'constructs'. The head is round, more or less; it is not flat. The planes of it cross the plane of canvas, recede from it, cross behind, and return. This is all directions. You must make your painting express this. It is not enough that there be features, the features must be part of a whole which is surrounded, behind as well as in front, by the atmosphere. The hair is not just hair, it is the outer covering of the skull, and of necessity follows the curves of the skull; and there is a back part to the skull which you cannot see, but which you can feel-can know the presence of, because of the way it is connected with the front part by the sides. All this you must make evident in your painting, as well as the facts which are on the side of the skull turned toward you. How make it evident? By values and directness of brush-stroke.
Background. - Never treat the background as something different from the head. The whole thing must go together. The slightest change in the background is equivalent to that much change of the head itself. For the change means necessarily a different contrast, either of color or light and shade, and it will have its effect on the color or relief of the head.

Paint the two together, then. Make the head and all that goes with it or around it as equally parts of the picture, which all tend to affect each other. Your background is not something which can be laid in after the head is finished. True you can paint the background immediately around the head first, and then, after painting the head, extend the background to the edge of the canvas; but the color, tone, and character of the background must be decided upon at the time the head is painted, and carried on in the same feeling.

It is never good work to paint the head and then paint a background behind it. Particularly if this true when there are windows or any objects whatever in the background. It is most important that the whole thing shall be seen in the same kind of light, and in the same relation of light. This is hardly to be done when the head is one painting and the background another.

CHAPTER XXXI: LANDSCAPE
FROM the usual rating of figures as the most important branch of painting, it would be natural to speak of that kind of work first. But work from the head must come before you attempt the figure, and there are a good many things that you can learn from landscape which will help you in figure-work. The manner of painting figures has been much modified, too, of late years, owing to certain qualities and points of view which are due to the study of landscape and the important position that it has come to occupy.

In the old days landscape was only a secondary thing, not only as a branch of art in itself, but particularly as it was used by figure painters. In this century it has so broadened in its scope that it is now recognized to be as important a field of work as any. But further than this, it has become the most influential study in the whole range of painting. From the development of the study of outdoor nature, and particularly outdoor light, it has come about that certain facts of nature have been recognized which were before neglected, ignored, or unsuspected, and these facts bear quite as much on the painting of the figure as on the painting of landscape. So that it is no more possible to paint the figure, in some respects, as it was painted as a matter of course a hundred years ago, while other ways of painting the figure, which were undreamed of at that time, are the matters of course now.

The whole problem of light has taken a new phase, and the treatment of color in that relation is modified in the painting of figures as well as in the other branches of work.
Pitch. - In no direction is this more marked than in the matter of pitch, or key. With the study of landscape, the range of gradation from light to dark has broadened. A picture may now be painted in a "high key;" the picture may be, from the highest to the lowest note in it, far lighter than would have been thought possible even thirty years ago.

This question of "bright pictures" is one which demands consideration. One has only to go into any exhibition of pictures to-day to be struck with the fact that the key of almost every picture in it, of whatever kind, has changed from what it would have been in the last generation. This is not merely the result of the spread of the "Impressionist" idea. That influence has only been strongly felt in this country within the last ten years. It is not that which I am speaking of now I mean the fact that even the grayer pictures - those which do not in any ordinary sense of the word belong to Impressionist work - are light in color, where they would once have been dark, or at least darker, The impressionists have had a definite influence, it is true; but the work of the earlier "plein air" men - the men who posed their models out-of-doors as a matter of principle, who studied landscape out-of-doors - was the first and most powerful influence, and that of the impressionists, coming along after it, has simply emphasized and carried it farther.

Bright Pictures. - Whatever may be thought of the work of those painters who are called "impressionists," it must be recognized that they have taught us how some things may be possible. And the present quality of brightness will necessarily be to a certain extent a permanent one in art. For like it or not as we may, it is true - true to a certain great, fundamental characteristic of nature. For outdoor light is bright, even on a gray day. The luminosity of color is too great to be represented with dark paint or lifeless color. And once this fact is recognized, it is a fact which will inevitably influence all kinds of work. What is possible and right at a certain stage of knowledge or recognition may be impossible when other points of view have once been accepted. We see only what we look for, and we look for on1y what we expect to see or are interested to see. You cannot go out-of-doors now and paint as you would have painted a hundred years ago. Then you would have painted what you saw then; but you would not have seen nor looked for things which you cannot help seeing now. For our eyes have been opened to new qualities and new facts, and once the eyes have been opened to them they can never be closed to them again.

Average Observation. - I say we see only what we look for, what we expect to find; anything out of the ordinary is hard to believe at first. In looking at nature the average observer does not even see the obvious. Certain general facts he accepts in the general, but as a rule there is no real recognition of what is there; no perception of the relations of things; no analysis; no real seeing, only a conventional acceptance of a thing as a thing. Men look at nature with one idea, and at a picture of nature with an entirely different idea. Nature in the picture is to most people just what they have I been accustomed to see in other pictures. They get their idea or how nature looks from those pictures, and if you show them a picture differently conceived they have difficulty in taking it in.

For this reason the "bright picture" does not "look right." I remember being asked by a man in a modern exhibition what I thought or "these bright pictures." When I asked which pictures he had reference to, I found that he meant the work of a man whose whole aim in painting landscape was, as he once said to me, to get "the just note" in color and value. One would think that the fact that the whole force of an extremely able and sincere mind was directed to that purpose, would produce a picture with at least truth of observation. Yet this was not what my passing acquaintance wanted to see. The picture he liked, which "had some nature in it," as he pointed out to me, was an extremely commonplace landscape with a black tree against a garish sky, reflected in a pool of water. The "bright picture" seemed to me exquisitely gray and quiet, though high in key, and the one with "nature in it," harsh and crude, but conventional; and that was just the point. The average observer wants to see, and does see, in nature what he is accustomed to accept in a picture as nature.
But a painter cannot go on such a basis. He may paint a dark picture, but he must find a subject which is dark to do so. He may not paint daylight with false pitch and false relations, and say he sees it so. With every liberty for personal seeing, there are still certain facts so established and obvious that personality must take them and deal with them, must use them and not ignore them, in its self-expression.

The pitch of daylight is one of these facts. Light and luminosity may not be qualities which appeal to your temperament. You may therefore not make them the main theme of your painting of landscape; but you cannot paint a daylight picture without in some way making it obvious that luminosity is a fundamental characteristic of day light. There is no other quality so universally present and pervasive. In sunlight it is the most vital quality. You might as well paint water with. out recognizing the fact that water is wet, as to paint daylight without recognizing the fact that diffused sunlight is brilliant.

A Help. - You will find it very useful as a help in seeing pitch as well as color to have a card with a square hole cut in it to look through at your landscape. Have one side covered with black velvet and the other left white. Compare darks with the black, and the lights with the white, and make the picture compose in the opening as in a frame.

Key and Harmony. - But you should remember that the high key for out-of-door work does not mean crude nor unsympathetic color, neither does it mean that there is nothing but sunshine and shadow. Your picture may be as high as you please in pitch, and yet be harmonious and pleasing. I have seen impressionist pictures of most pronounced type hung in the same room with old pictures and in perfect harmony with them. It means that good color is always good color, and will always be harmonious with other good color, whatever the pitch of either. One picture is simply a different note from the other, that is all. The color in nature is not crude in not being dark. The relations of spots of color are just; you have only to be as just in observing them, and your picture will be harmonious.

Make your notes just all over your canvas. Have some of them just and the rest false, and of course it will be wrong. Or if you try to make crudity take the place of brilliancy, you will not get harmony. The harmony which comes from the presence in just relation of all the colors is none the less beautiful because more alive. You need not try for the most contrasting and most sparkling qualities of out-of-door color, but you should feel for the out-of-doorness of it.
The space, the breadth, lack of confines, the largeness and movement, vibration and life, - these are the things which the modern painter has discovered in landscape and has emphasized; and this is what has made modern landscape a vital force in modern art. Whatever you do or do not see, feel, and express in your painting, these you must see, feel, and express for once these qualities are recognized and accepted they are as universal as the law of gravity, and can be as little ignored.

Landscape Drawing. - Landscape is more difficult to draw than is generally thought; not only is the character affected by the scale of the main masses, but there is great probability of overdrawing. The curves that mark the modelling of the ground are very difficult to give justly. The altitude and slope of mountains are almost invariably exaggerated. The twists and windings of roadways and fences are seldom carefully drawn; yet the most exquisite movement of line is to be gained by just representation of them. To give the character of a tree, too, without making out too much of the detail of it, needs more precise observation than it generally
gets.

Get the character; get the sentiment of it. Search for the important things here first, and be more particular about the placing of each line than about the number of lines. Don't draw too many lines in a landscape; don't draw too many objects. Carefully study the scene before you till you have decided what parts are most essential in giving the character that you want to express, and then draw most carefully those parts. See which are the most expressive lines in it. Get the swing and movement of those lines in the large; then study the more subtle movement of them. Get these things on the can vas first, and put everything else in as subsidiary to them. Have all this well placed before you I begin to paint, and allow for little things being painted on to this.

Don't get too many things into one landscape. The spirit of the time and place is what will make the beauty of it, not the details nor the mere facts. This spirit you will find in a few things, not in many. Having found which lines and forms, which masses and relations of color and value, express this, the more carefully you avoid putting in other things the more entirely you emphasize the quality which is the real reason of existence of your picture.

In studying landscape, work for one thing at a time. What has been said of sketching and studies applies here. Landscape is the most bewildering of subjects in its multiplicity of facts and objects and colors and contrasts. If you cannot find a way to simplify it you will neither know where to begin nor where to leave off. I cannot tell you just what to do or not to do, because no two landscapes are alike. Recipes will do nothing in helping you to paint. But there is the general principle which you may follow, and I try to keep it before you even at the risk of over- repetition. In no kind of picture can you drag in unimportant things simply because they exist in nature. In landscape more than elsewhere, because you cannot arrange it, but must select in the actual presence of everything, you must learn to concentrate on the things which mean most, and to refuse to recognize those which will not lend themselves to the central idea.

Selection. - When you select your subject, or "motif" as the French call it, select it for something definite. There is always something which makes you think this particular view will make a good picture. State to yourself what it is that you see in it, not in detail, but in the general. Is if the general color effect of the whole, or a contrast? Is it a sense of largeness and space, or a beautiful combination of line in the track of a road, or row of trees, or a river? Perhaps it is the mass and majesty of a mountain or a group of trees. Something definite or definable catches you -else you had better not do it at all; and what that something is you must know quite precisely, or you will not have a well-understood picture.

When you have distinctly in your mind what you want to paint it for, then see that the composition is so placed on your canvas that that characteristic is the main thing in evidence. With this done it is a very easy thing to concentrate on that characteristic, and to leave out whatever tends to break it up or distract from it. This is the only way you can simplify your subject. First by a distinct conception of what you paint it for, then by so much analysis of the whole field of vision as will show you what docs and what does not help in the expression of it.
Detail. - Much detail in landscape is never good painting. Whether big or little, your canvas must express something larger and more important than detail. Give detail when it is needed to express character or to avoid slovenliness. Give as much detail where the emphasis lies as will insure the completeness of representation - not a touch more.

Structure. - Have your foreground details well understood in drawing and value. This does not require the drawing of leaf and twig, but it does require structure. Everything requires structure. Structure is fundamental to character. If you will not take the trouble to study the character of any least thing you put in, don't put it in at all. Nothing is important enough to put in, if it is not important enough to have its character and its purpose in the picture understood.

I spoke of structure in speaking of the head. If I said nothing but "structure, structure, structure" to the end of the section, you would get the impression of what is the most important thing in drawing. If you will look for and find the line and proportion expressing the anatomy which makes the thing fulfil its particular function in the world, you will understand its character, and that is what is important everywhere.
Work In Season. - Make your picture in the season which it represents- I don't say that a good summer picture may not be made in winter; but I do say that you are more likely to express the summer quality while the summer is around you. There is too much half painting of pictures, and then leaving them to be "finished up" afterwards.

Of course you can make all your studies and sketches, and then begin and finish the picture from them. If you are careful to have plenty of material, to accumulate all your facts with the intention of working from those facts, all right; but it would be better if you were to work your picture in the season of it, as long as you are a student at least. For until you have had a great deal of experience, you will find when you come to paint your picture that some very much needed material you have neglected to collect, and you cannot safely supply it from memory. If this occurs in the time of year represented in the picture, you can just go out and study it.

Out-of-door Landscapes. - The most important movement in modern art, the most important in its effects on all kinds of work, is what I have mentioned as the plein air movement. It was thought by some clear-headed men that the best way to paint an out-door picture was to take their canvases out-of-doors to paint it. Instead of working from a few color sketches and many pencil studies, they painted the whole picture from first to last in the open air. Working in this way, certain qualities got into the pictures unavoidably. Necessarily the color was fresher and truer. Necessarily there was more breadth and frankness, and less conventionality and mere picture-making. The spirit of the open got onto the canvas, and the whole type of picture was changed. For the first time out-of-door values were studied as things in themselves interesting and important. The result on landscape pictures was that pictures painted in the studio seemed unreal and insincere, and that men looked and studied less for the making of pictures, and more for what nature had to reveal.

It would be a good thing for you as a student if you would do as these men did whenever you want to do any work at landscape, whether for itself or for background. If you wish to pose any kind of figure with landscape background, pose and paint your figure out-of-doors. Make sketches as much as you please, make studies as much as you please; but make them for the suggestions and knowledge they will give you, and not for material to be used in painting a picture at home. For your picture, start, and go on with, and finish it out-doors; you will get a feeling of freshness and truth in your work which you cannot get any other way. You will also acquire a power of concentration and of selection and rejection in the presence of nature which is of the utmost importance to you.
"Impressionism." - It is not possible to speak of landscape and plein air without mention of the "Impressionists." You should understand what "impressionism" really is, and what it is not, and what the impressionist stands for. Whether we like it or not, this work is not to be ignored. It has tried for certain things, and has shown that they can be much more justly represented than had before been believed to be possible, and fad or no fad, that result stands.

In the first place, impressionism does not mean "purple and yellow." Anyone who says "purple and yellow" and throws the whole thing aside, is a very superficial critic. The purple and yellow are incidental to the impressionist, not essential. It is only one of the ways of handling color by means of which it was found possible to express certain qualities of light.

Before everything else the real impressionist stands for the representation of the personal conception and method as against the traditional. He believes that if a man has anything of his own to say, he must say it in his own way; and that if he cannot find that nature has anything to say to him personally, if nature cannot give him a persona1 message, if he can only paint by giving another man's ideas and another man's method, then he had better not paint at all; so that whatever he may see to paint, and however he finds a way to express it, the value of it and the truth of it lie in the fact that it is his, his way of seeing, and his way of expressing, - that it is "personal."

Luminosity. - The impressionist is imbued with the fact that all the light by means of which things are at all visible is luminous - that it vibrates. He does not think that living light can be represented by dead color. He strives to make his color live also. This is the secret of the purple and yellow. By the contrast of these two colors, by the combination and contrast and juxtaposition of the complementary colors and the use of pure pigments, he can make his colors more vibrant, and so give more of the pitch of real sunlight. He actually applies on his canvas the laws which are known to hold with light and color scientifically. He applies practically in his work those laws which the scientist furnishes him with theoretically. The result in some hands is garish, crude. But the best men have shown that it is possible to use the means so as make a subtle harmony and a luminous brilliancy that have never before been attained. The crudity is the result of the man, not of the method.

The Application. - The application of all this to your own work is that when you want pitch and sunlight you can get it through the observance of the laws of color contrast, and such a laying on of pigment as will bring this about. Try to study the actual contrasts of color, not as they seem, but as they are in nature. Study the facts which have been observed as to colors in their effects on each other, and then try to see these in nature and to paint the results.

The Luminists. - This is the principle of all "loose painting" carried out scientifically. It is the cause of the peculiar technique of those impressionists who paint in streaks and spots of pigment. The manner of putting on paint does interfere with the continuity of outline in the drawing necessarily, but there is a marked gain in the quality of light; and as these men are "luminists," and light is what they want primarily, the sacrifice is justifiable, or at any rate explicable.

Now if you understand the scientific principle, and the practical application and its result on canvas, you have in your hands one of the main instrumentalities in the rendering of one great quality of out-of-doors. How far you adopt it is a matter for you to decide for yourself. If the complete adoption of it implies too much of a sacrifice of other things of equal or greater value to you, then modify it, or take advantage of it as much as will give you the balance of qualities you most want. There is one way to get light and brilliancy and life into your color: adapt it to your purpose if you need it.

This is the application of color juxtaposition to mixing. The placing of complementaries so as to increase contrast is another way of adding to the brilliancy of light. You will find this most useful when you want to give the greatest possible emphasis to the effect of sunlight and shadow. If you keep your shadows cool, your lights will be the richer and more sparkling because of that contrast. If you want more strength in a note of color, get its complement as near it as you can. Look for their iridescence of edges of shadow, and of the contours of objects. You will get greater relief of light and shade by contrast of warm and cool than contrast of light and dark.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not advising you to be an impressionist. I wish only that you shall see what there is in this way of looking at nature and of representation of certain effects of nature, which will be of use to you in the painting of landscape. I would have you know what means are at your command, what is possible to accomplish in certain directions, and how it is possible to accomplish it; then I would have you make use of whatever will most directly and completely serve your purpose.

Do not use any color or colors, any method or point of view, because of any advocacy whatsoever. Know first what you want to paint and why. Let nature speak to you. Go out and look at landscape. Study and observe; see the effect which makes you want to paint it, and then use the means and method which seem most entirely, adapted to it. Don't ask yourself, nor let any one else ask you, Is this So-and-So's method? or, Does this belong to this or that school? Don't bother about schools or methods at all. Look frankly to see, accept frankly, and then work to render and convey as frankly as you have seen. Be sincere - sincere with yourself and with your painting: then you will surely work at whatever you do from conviction, and not from fad; and whether it makes you paint as an impressionist or not is a very minor matter, because sincerity of purpose is the most important thing in painting, and method of representation one of the least.

Atmosphere. - A universal characteristic of nature will be a fundamental one in landscape. A landscape which you cannot breathe in is not a perfect one. We live and breathe in atmosphere, and the expression of atmosphere will go far to make your landscape true. But atmosphere is not haziness. Neither is it vagueness nor negativeness of color. Truth of color-quality, and justness of relation will do most in getting it. You had better not try for atmosphere as a thing, but as a result. Anything so universal and so indefinite can be expressed by no one thing. If you try to get it by anyone means you will miss it. Study, then, the subtlety of color relation and justness of value. Try to be sensitive to the slightest variety of tone, and be satisfied with no least falsity of rendering, and you will find that your picture will not lack atmosphere.

Color of Contour. - An important thing for you to look for and to study is the color of contours. You will not find it easy; not easy even to know what it is that you are looking for. But consider it as a combination of contiguous values and color vibrations, and things will reveal themselves to you.

No form is composed of unvarying color. No combination of color surrounding it lacks variety. All along the edge of forms and objects, of whatever kind, the value and color relation constantly change. The outline is not constant. Here and there it becomes lost from identity of value and color with what surrounds it, and again defines itself. The edge is not sharp. The color rays vibrate across each other. The inevitable variety of tint and value, of definiteness and vagueness, gives a never-ending play of contrasts and blendings. These are qualities which go to the harmonizing of color, to the expression of light, and particularly to the feeling of atmosphere. This constant variety of contrasting edges is the constant movement and play of the visual rays, and the study of it gives life and vibration to the picture, and all the objects represented in it. Outdoors, particularly when the play of diffused light and the movement of all the objects is continually felt, either through their own elasticity or because of the heat and light waves, this study is most necessary, if you would get the feeling of freedom, space, and air.

Skies. - In the painting of the sky there are several points to be kept in mind. The sky, even on the quietest day, is full of movement. Cloud masses change continually. If there are no clouds there is constant vibration in the blue; constant variety in the plane of color, - a throb of color sensation which is not to be expressed by a dead, flat tint.

Paint the sky loosely. Lay on the color as you will, with a broad, flat brush, or with a loose, smudgy handling; put it on with horizontal strokes, or with criss-cross touches, but never make it a lifeless tone. Have variety in it; keep a pulsation between the warm and cool color. You can work in the separate touches of half-mixed color, warm and cool, all through the sky, so that the whole tone will be flat and even, but not dense and dead. So far as the sky is concerned, the atmosphere is essential, and is to be represented not by dense color, but by free, loose, vibrating color.

Clouds. - If you have clouds to paint, do not draw them rigidly. Get the effect of the mass and movement, and the lightness of them. As they constantly change in form, any one form they may assume cannot be characteristic. The type form is what you must get, and the suggestion of the motion and lightness. You can suggest, too, the direction of the wind by the way they mass and sway and flow. The direction of the sun's rays, too, counts in the color of them. The outline of a cloud mass is never hard, never rigid. The pitch and luminosity and subtlety are what give you most of the effect of it.
Study the type of cloud, of course. It is a cumulus, cirrus, stratus or what not. This character is important; but the character lies ill the whole body of the cloud form, not in the accidental outlines or the special position of it for the moment.

Sky Composition. - The massing of cloud forms is a very useful factor in the composition of the landscape. The cloud bank or cloud line is capable of giving accent or balance to the picture. As it is not constant in position any more than in form, you can place it with truth to nature pretty nearly always where it will do the most good as an element in the composition. Make use of them, then, and study the forms and the possible phases of them so as to make the best use of them.

Diffused Light. - Much of the characteristic quality of out-door light is the result of the diffusion of light due to both the refraction and the reflection of the sky. The light which bathes the landscape comes in all directions from the sky. Necessarily, then, the sky will be in most cases far higher in value than anything under it. Even the blue of the sky, which looks darker than some bit of light in the landscape, you will find, if you can manage to get them to tell against each other, will be the more luminous of the two, and will look lighter. There are times when the sun glares on a white building or a piece of white sand, when the white tells light against the blue. But these are exceptions, and if we could get a blue paint which would give the intensity of color, and also the brilliancy of the light, even these cases would be most truly represented with the sky as the higher value. It is a case of whether to sacrifice value to color, or the reverse, as we cannot have both
Sometimes, however, in a storm, the dense dark of the storm sky is really lower in value than some white object against it, especially if there be a bit of sun breaking through on it.

But in general, nevertheless; you should consider the sky as always lighter and more luminous than anything under it.

Three Planes. - It will help you in understanding the way the light falls on landscape to consider everything as in one of three planes, and these planes taking greater or less proportions of light according to the posit ion of the sun with reference to them.

The position of the sun changes from a point immediately over, to a point practically at right angles to all objects in nature. Everything that can exist under the sun will come in one of these planes, and at some time in the day in each. The vertical, the horizontal, or some sort of an oblique between these two. If the sun is overhead exactly, the flat ground, the tops of trees and houses, will get the full amount of sunlight. The vertical planes, sides of houses, depths of foliage, etc., will get the least, some of them being lighted only by diffused and reflected light. The planes lying between these two extremes will get more or less, according as they are more or less at right angles to the direct rays of the sun. And as the sun declines from the zenith, the vertical planes get more and more and the horizontal planes less and less of the light, till in the late afternoon the banks of trees and sides of buildings and cloud masses are gilded with light, and the broad horizontal plains of land and water are in shadow.

However obscured the sun may be, this principle holds more or less; and it makes clear and helps you to observe and notice many facts in landscape light and shade which it is necessary to know.
Millet said that all the beauty of color and value, and the whole art of painting, rested on the comprehension and observance of these facts.

He said that as the planes of any form turned towards or away from the light and so got more or less of it, and as one form stood more or less far back of another and the atmosphere came between, the color and value changed; and in the observance of this, and its representation as applied to any and every object or group of objects, lay the whole of painting. All the possible beauties of the art rested on it. He showed a painting of a single pear in which these things were most subtly observed, and said that that painting was as complete and perfect as any painting he could do simply because in the observance of these relations was implied the observance of everything which was vital to painting.

Short Sittings. - This characteristic, and the steady change of position of the sun and its effects on all the objects which are directly lighted by it, make it necessary, whenever you are painting from nature out-of-doors, that you should not paint at one thing very long at a time. The light changes pretty rapidly; at high noon it only takes a few moments to exactly reverse the light. It is seldom that you can do any just study for more than an hour or an hour and a half at a sitting. Some men do work two or three hours, but they are not studying justly all that time; for that which was light is dark three hours later, and any true study of value and color is impossible under these conditions. Of course on gray days this is less marked, but you must suit your sittings to the time and facts.

t would be better if you had more canvases, and worked a short time on each, and many days on all. You would have the truest work.
Monet works never more than a half-hour on one canvas; but when he starts out he takes a half-dozen or more different canvases, and paints on each till the light has changed.

Theodore Robinson seldom worked more than three-quarters of an hour, or at most an hour, on one canvas; but, he worked for twenty or thirty days on each canvas, and sometimes had a single canvas under way for successive seasons.

Any man who would truly study for the just value and note of color must, work more or less in this way when he works out-of-doors.

Don. That is how I paint too.

CHAPTER XXXII: MARINES
ALL that has been said on landscape painting applies to marines. You have the same open-air feeling and vibration of light and color. There is no need to say the same things over again. It is only necessary to take all these things for granted, and emphasize certain other things which are peculiar to the sea.

Color of Water. - You must study the color of water in the large when you paint it. Remember that its color depends on other things than what it is itself. The character of the bottom, whether it be rocky or sandy, and the depth of the water, will affect its color; and to one accustomed to see these things, the picture betrays its truth or falsity at a glance, especially as the character of the wave and the great movement of the whole surface are influenced by the same things.

CHAPTER XXXIII: FIGURES
The broadest classification of figure pictures is to consider them as of two kinds, - those painted in an out-door or diffused light, and those painted in an in-door or concentrated light. The painting of figures out-of-doors will find more difficult if you have had no experience in painting them in the studio. The problems of light and shade and color are more complex in the diffused light, and the knowledge of structure and modeling, as well as of special values gained by studio study, will be most helpful to you when you paint out-of doors. I should say, then, don't attempt any serious painting of the human figure in the open air till you have had some experience with its special problems in the house.

The Nude.- No good figure-work has ever been done which was not founded on a knowledge of the nude. Whether the figure is draped or not, the nude is the basis of form. The best painters have always made their studies of pose and action in the nude, and then drawn the draperies over that. This insures the truth of action and structure true, which is almost sure to be lost when the drawing of the form is made through drapery or clothing. The underlying structure is as essential here as in portrait. It is the more imperative that the body be felt within the clothes from the fact that it cannot be seen. There must be no ambiguity, no doubt as to the anatomy underneath; for without this there can be no sense of actuality.

I do not say paint the nude. On the contrary, if you want to go so far as that in the study of the figure, you must not attempt to do it with the aid of a book. Go to a good life class. But I wish to emphasize the principle that when you undertake to paint anything involving the figure, you must know something of the structure of what is more or less hidden, and must make allowance for the disguising of form which the draping of it will inevitably cause.

And when you draw your figure, you should lay in your main lines, at any rate, from the nude figure if you can. If you cannot command a professional model for this purpose, you can only be more careful about your study of the underlying lines and forms as they are suggested by the saliencies of the draperies.
If this is the case, be most accurate in those measurements which place the proportions of the parts which show through the covering, and try to trace out by the modeling, where the lines would run. By mapping out these proportions, and drawing the lines over the drapery masses wherever you can make them out, you can judge to a certain extent of the truth of action in your drawing.

The use of a lay figure will help you somewhat if you can get one which is true in proportion. It will not help you much in the finer modeling, but it will at least insure your structural lines being in the right place, and that is as much as you can hope for without the special study of the nude.
A lay figure is expensive, costing about three hundred dollars in this country. You will hardly be apt to aspire to a full-sized one, as only professional painters can afford to pay so much for accessories. But small wooden ones are within the means of most people, and will be found useful for the purpose I have mentioned, and one should be obtained.

When you have assured yourself, as far as you can by its use with and without special draperies, of the right action of your drawing, you must do your painting from the draped model.

The Model. - Never paint without nature before you. If you paint the figure, never paint without the model. For the sake of the study of it, it goes without saying that you can learn to paint the figure only by studying from the figure. But beyond that, for the sake of your picture, you can have no hope of doing good work without working from the actual object represented. The greatest masters have never done pictures "out of their heads." The compositions and esthetic qualities came from their heads it is true, but they never worked these things out on canvas without the aid of nature. And the greater the master, the more humble was he in his dependence on nature for the truth of his facts.

Much more, then, the student needs to keep himself rigidly to the guidance of nature; and this he can only do by the constant use of the model.

One Figure or Many. - Whether you have one or more figures, the problem may be kept the same. The canvas must balance in mass and line and in color. When you decide to make a picture with several figures, study the composition first as if they were not figures, but groups of masses and line. Get the whole to balance and compose, then decide your color composition. Simplify rather than make complex. The more you have of number, the more you should consider them as parts of a whole. Keep the idea of grouping; combine the figures, rather than divide them. Have every figure in some logical relation to its group, and then the group in relation to the other parts. Don't string them out or spot them about. Study the spaces between as well as the spaces they occupy. And don't fill up these spaces with background objects. That will not bind the group together, but will separate it. Fill the spaces with air and with values-even more important!

All this arranged, paint each group and each figure as if it were one thing instead of many. As you treat the head, the body, the dress, and the chair as all parts of a whole in a single sitting figure, so treat the various heads, bodies, dresses, etc., in a group as parts of a whole, by studying always the relations of each to each. And then study to keep the different groups as parts of whole canvas in the same way.
Simplicity of Subject. - But do not be too ambitious in your attempts. Keep your subjects simple. Don't be in a hurry to paint many figures. Paint one figure well before you try several.

You will find plenty of scope for your knowledge and skill in single figures. Practice with sketches and compositions, if you will, in grouping several figures, and try to manage them so that the whole shall be simple in mass and effect; but do not attempt, as a student, without experience and skill in the painting of one figure, to paint pictures containing several. By the time you can really paint a single figure well, you can dispense with a manual of painting, and branch out as ambitiously as you please. In the meantime, everything that you have knowledge enough to express well, you can express with the single figure.
With the model, the background, the pose and occupation, the clothing and draperies, ad whatever accessories may be natural to the thing as elements, it is possible to work out all the problems cannot be made with one figure, more figures will only make it worse.

Look again at Whistler's portrait of his mother. Consider it now, not as portrait, but as a single figure. What are the qualities of it which would be helped if there were more in it? The very simplicity of it makes the handling of it more masterly. Look also at the one simple figure of painting that are likely to get themselves onto one canvas you will find in this.

See what movement and dignity there are in it. How statuesque it is! It is monumental. It has scale; it imposes its own standard of measurement. There are air and envelopment and light and breadth. Are these not qualities enough or one canvas?

Nature the Suggester. - Take your suggestions, your ideas, for pictures from nature. Keep your eyes open. Observe all poses which may hint of possible schemes of light and shade, of composition, or of color. It is marvelous how constantly groupings and poses and effects of all kinds occur in every-day-life. Humanity is kaleidoscopic in its succession of changes; one after another giving a phase new and different, but equally suggestive of a picture if you will take the hint. The picture which originates in a natural occurrence is always true if it is sincerely and frankly painted. Truth is more various than fiction. It is easier to see than to invent. And in the arrangement of the material which nature freely and constantly furnishes to him there is scope for all the invention of man.

ction and Character. - The picture comes from the action -resides in it. The action comes from the act, and is natural to it, expressive of it. Any gesture or position which is the natural and unaffected result of an essential action will be true and vital, suggestive of nature, and beautiful because it will inevitably have character -be characteristic. The beauty of the picture is not something external to the costumes, occupations, and life which surround you, but is to be found, contained in it, and brought out, manifested, made visible, by the mere logical working out of the need, the custom,or the occasion.
Emphasis is only the salience of the most natural movement.

Daily life swarms with pictures. You do not need to go to other places and other times for subjects. If you are awake to what is going on around you, if you see the essential line of the occupation, or the mass and color which is incidental to every least activity, you will have more suggested to you than you have time to do justice to. And it is your business to see the beautiful in the commonplace. Everything is commonplace till you see the charm in it. The artistic possibility does not lie in the unusual in any subject, but in the fact that the thing cannot get done without action and grouping and color and contrast; and these are the artists opportunities. Keep your eyes open for them; learn to recognize them when you see them; look for these rather than for the details of the accidental fact which brings them out. See the movement of it, and the relation of it to what surrounds it, and you will hardly avoid seeing the picture in it.
Here is a composition which is an almost literal rendering of the movement and light and shade effect of a position quite accidentally seen.

The whole effect of lighting and of line, the grouping and the pose, resulted purely from the musician's desire to get a good light on his music. There was no need to add to it. It was simply necessary to recognize the charm of it, and to represent that charm through it as frankly as it could be done.

Posing the Model. - Let the character of the model suggest the pose. If you have a scheme for a picture, choose a model whose personality will lend itself naturally to the occupation or action natural to that scheme. Then follow the suggestion which you find in the model. Some rearrangement will always be necessary if you do not use as a model the same person who originally gave you the idea for the picture. Every human being has different manner. You cannot hope for exactly the same expression in one person that you found in another. But put the model as nearly as you can in the same situation and pose, and then when the model eases from the unnatural muscular balance into the one natural to him, you will find the idea taken from your first observation translated into the characteristics of your present model.

Never try to place a model in a pose which he can only hold by an unnatural strain. You will not get a satisfactory result from it. Study your model; see what pose he most naturally falls into, and then take advantage of one of these, and arrange your picture with reference to it.

Never attempt to represent a character in your picture by using a model of a different class or type from it; you will not be successful either in painting a lady from a model who is a peasant, nor in painting a peasant from a model who is a lady. The life and occupation and thought common to your model will get into your painting of her; and if that is not in accordance to the idea in the picture, your picture will be false. The dress, no less than the pose and occupation, must be such as is natural to your model. The accessories of your picture must befit the character you wish to paint; otherwise your model becomes no more than a lay figure.

Take note of the characteristics which are peculiar to your model, and use them; do not change them nor idealize them. Rather paint them as they are, and make them a vital part of your study of the subject. This is the best you can do with these characteristics. They may be the mot expressive thing in your picture. If they are of such a nature that you cannot use them in this way, then do not use this model at all; you cannot get rid of these things. In trying to obscure or idealize them, you only lose character, or paint a character into your model which is unnatural to him; the result will not be satisfactory.

Quiet Sitters. - An inexperienced painter should not use a model with too much vivacity of body or of expression. The quiet, reposeful, thoughtful model, who will change little in position or manner, will simplify the problem. A model too wide awake or too sleepy will either of them give you trouble.

Avoid very young children as models, and particularly babies. They are never quiet, and the problems you will have even with the best of models will be made enormously more difficult by their restlessness.
For your first work choose models with well-marked faces, and pose them in a direct light which will give you the simplest and strongest effect of light and shade.

See that your sitter is in as comfortable a position as you can get him into, so that the pose can be held easily. Don't attempt difficult and unusual attitudes. Such things require much skill and knowledge to take advantage of, and to use successfully. Make your effect more in the study of composition and color than in fanciful poses. Later, when you have gained experience, you may do this sort of thing.

If you are painting a face, see that the eyes are in at a restful angle with the head, and that they are not facing a too strong light, nor are obliged to look at a blank space. Give them room to have restful focus, and perhaps something pleasant or interesting to look at.

Length of Pose. - No sitter can hold a pose in perfect motionlessness. Do not expect it. You must learn to make allowance for certain slight changes which are always occurring. You must give your model plenty of rest, too, especially if he be not a professional model. A half-hour pose to ten minutes' rest is as much as a regular model expects to do as a rule. If you have a friend posing for you, particularly if it be a woman. Twenty minutes' pose and ten minutes' rest, for a couple of hours, is all you should expect; and if the pose is a standing one, this will probably be more than she can hold- make the rests longer.

An inexperienced model - and sometimes even a trained one-is likely to faint while posing, particularly if the room be close. Look out for this; watch your sitter, and see that she is not looking tired. The minute that you see the least sign of fatigue, if she shows pallor-rest. Do not get so absorbed in your canvas that you do not notice your model's condition. If you are observing and studying your model as closely as you should, you can hardly fail to notice any change that may occur, and you should at once give her relief.

Distance. - Don't work too near your model, nor too near your canvas. As regards the first, be far enough away to see the whole of the figure you are painting, or of that part which you are doing, entirely at one focus of the eye, and yet near enough to see the detail clearly. If you are too near, you see parts at a time, and do not see it as a whole. If you are too far, you see too generally for good study. You might make it a rule to be away from your subject a distance of about three or four times the extreme measurement of it. If it is a full length, say fifteen to twenty feet, if you can get so large a room. If it is a head and shoulders, about six or eight feet. Never get closer than six feet.

As to your canvas, work at arm's length. Don't bend over - again you see parts, and you must treat your canvas as a whole. Never rest your hand or arm on the canvas. Train your arm to be steady. Sit up straight, hold your brush well out at the end of the handle, and your arm extended; now and then, if you need closer work, lean forward, and if necessary use a rest-stick; but as a rule your work will be stronger and hang together better if you work as I have suggested. Of course you will often get up, and walk away from your work. Set your easel alongside the model, and go away to a distance, and compare them. Too intense application to the canvas forgets that relations, effect and wholeness of impression are of the greatest importance, and are only to be judged of when seen at some distance.

Background. - Under the general title of background you may place everything which will come in as accessory to the figure, and against or alongside of which it stands. The picture must 'hang together;' must have envelopment; must be a whole, not an aggregation of parts. Everything that goes to the making up of this whole must have a natural and logical connection with it. From the first conception of the picture you must
consider the background as an essential part of it, and as something which will have a vital effect upon the figure. The color of the background must be though of as part of, because affecting, the figure itself. The simplicity or variety in the background, the number of objects in it, must be considered as to the effect on the figure also. You cannot make the background a patchwork of objects and colors without interfering with the effect of the main thing in the picture.

If your figure is simple and quiet, keep the background simply always. If the character of the case demands some detail, and a variety of objects, then treat them so that their effect is as simple as possible; and the figure must be made stronger, in order that the variety in the background shall not overpower it. Control it by the way the light or the color masses, or simplify the painting of them. Keep the background in value as regards prominence and relief of objects as well as in the matter of color.

Composition o