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Title: Outdoor Sketching

Author: Francis Hopkinson Smith

Release date: November 27, 2008 [eBook #27340]

Language: English

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SKETCHING ***

E-text prepared by Sankar Viswanathan, Juliet Sutherland,
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Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London

Outdoor Sketching

Four Talks Given Before
The Art Institute of Chicago

The Scammon Lectures, 1914

By

F. Hopkinson Smith

With Illustrations by
the Author

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.

Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames
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.
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.

The George and Vulture Inn, London
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.
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.

Diagram of Charcoal Technic
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.
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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