CORNELL 
 
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 0"j5Joor sketching :four talks given befo 
 
 3 1924 020 565 671 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
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 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924020565671 
 
BOOKS BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH 
 Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
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Outdoor Sketching 
 
Pari uf the Silc of the Marshalsca Jail, London 
 
i'aii of the Site of the Mj 
 
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 
 
 191S 
 
Copyright, 191S, by 
 Charles Scribner's Sons 
 
 Published March, 191S 
 
Contents 
 
 P»ge 
 
 I. Composition ^ 
 
 II. Mass 37 
 
 III. Water-Colors 73 
 
 IV. Charcoal "7 
 
Illustrations 
 
 Part of the Site of the Marshalsea Jail, London 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 FACING 
 TAGE 
 
 Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Tharaes .... 84 
 
 The George and Vulture Inn, London 136 
 
 Diagram of Charcoal Technic 142 
 
COMPOSITION 
 
Composition 
 
 MY chief reason for confining these four 
 talks to the outdoor sketch is because I 
 have been an outdoor painter since I was six- 
 teen years of age; have never in my whole life 
 painted what is known as a studio picture 
 evolved from memory or from my inner con- 
 sciousness, 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 appoint- 
 ments. 
 
 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 young- 
 
 3 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 est 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 
 vitaUty, its life-spark; the way it breathes 
 back at you, under a touch made unconsciously, 
 because you saw it, recorded it, and then for- 
 got 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 
 
 4 
 
Composition 
 
 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 imequalled by any other in my life's expe- 
 rience. 
 
 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 hap- 
 piness 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, 
 
 5 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 
 thumb-nail are but an index of your enjoyment. 
 
 Now you are ready. You loosen your cra- 
 vat, 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 
 6 
 
Composition 
 
 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 limch. 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. AH 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 efifect. 
 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, 
 
 7 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 then pouncing down upon it quickly, belabor- 
 ing 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 de- 
 lights 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 marvel- 
 
 8 
 
Composition 
 
 lous stuflfs, 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 hiUs 
 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 modem 
 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 col- 
 umns of verd-antique, supporting arches light 
 
 9 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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. Scat- 
 tered over the uneven pavement, patched with 
 strips and squares of shadows, lounge groups 
 of priests in bewildering robes of mauve, com- 
 yeUow, white, and sea-green; while back be- 
 neath the cool arches bunches of natives list- 
 lessly 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 fel- 
 low next him selling herbs, sprawled out on the 
 marble floor, too lazy to crawl away from the 
 slant of sunshine slipping through the ragged 
 
 lO 
 
Composition 
 
 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 aroxmd 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 paint- 
 ing ground, reaUy, 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 
 
 II 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 nonde- 
 script 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 gon- 
 dolas to pass — this canal of mine; only deep 
 enough to let a wine barge shp through; so nar- 
 row 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 
 
 12 
 
Composition 
 
 of its water-surface part of everything about 
 it, so clear are the reflections; full of moods, 
 whims, and fancies, this wave space — one mo- 
 ment 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 jum- 
 ble of tatters and tangles, maddening in detail, 
 brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the 
 whole scintillating with a picturesqueness be- 
 yond 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 
 
 13 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 J and in giving them to you, 
 remember that no man is more keenly con- 
 scious of his limitations than the speaker. My 
 own system of work, all of which will be ex- 
 plained 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 require- 
 ments are thoughtful and well-sti^died selection 
 before your brush touches your canvas; a cor- 
 rect knowledge of coniposition; a definite grasp 
 14 
 
Composition 
 
 of the problem of light and dark, or, in other 
 words, mass; a free, sure, and imtrammelled ra- 
 pidity 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 per- 
 missible 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 
 
 15 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 un- 
 duly 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 grada- 
 tions of light and shade reducing even the blaze 
 of the noonday sim to half-tones. Still an- 
 other, whether by the fault of over-magnifying 
 power or long-sightedness, detects an infinity 
 of detail in nature, and is not satisfied imtil 
 each particular blade of grass stands on end 
 like the qiulls 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 
 i6 
 
Composition 
 
 a tree can be distinguished from a farm-house 
 so long as it is fluffy enough to be indistinct. 
 
 These defects, sympathies, tendencies, what- 
 ever one may call them, only prove the more 
 conclusively that there are many varying stand- 
 ards 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 insist- 
 ing 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 con- 
 trol 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 
 
 17 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 ob- 
 jects themselves, without arrangement and fore- 
 shortenings or twistings to the right and to 
 i8 
 
Composition 
 
 the left. Nothing, in fact, seems to me so as- 
 tounding 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 comer, 
 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 in- 
 terest, 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 hues being 
 
 19 
 
Outdoor Sketdiing 
 
 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, imtil this constantly changing 
 kaleidoscope repeats itself in its first aspect, 
 imtil you have fairly grasped its meaning and 
 analyzed its component parts. Or until either 
 the effect that first delighted you, or the sub- 
 sequent effect that charmed you still more, be- 
 comes 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 
 20 
 
Composition 
 
 you have finished and blocked up the im- 
 mediate 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 in- 
 adequate 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 devo- 
 tee imder 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 
 
 21 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 hght 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 present- 
 
 22 
 
Composition 
 
 ment — and all this before he begins even men- 
 talty to compose its salient features on the 
 square of his canvas. You can turn, if you 
 choose, your camera sk5rward and focus the top 
 of a steeple and only that. It is true, but it 
 is uninteresting, or rather imintelligible, imtil 
 you focus also the church door, and the gather- 
 ing groups, and the overgrown pathway that 
 winds through the quiet graveyard. So a pic- 
 ture 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 ad- 
 vertisement of a patent chum, a railroad time- 
 table, 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 
 
 23 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 makes or unmakes the picture and establishes 
 or ruins the rank of the painter. No matter 
 how carefid 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 in- 
 stantly 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. 
 
 24 
 
Composition 
 
 My own rule is to spend half the time I am 
 devoting to my sketch in carefxilly 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 in- 
 vestigation are, of course, Kmited, 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 ob- 
 ject which next attracts your eye, and so re- 
 lieves 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 
 
 25 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 be- 
 fore you in nature; and this one point you must 
 26 
 
Composition 
 
 treat as does the electrician in a theatre who 
 keeps the lime-light on the star of the play. 
 
 Another requirement is rapidity of execu- 
 tion, 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 
 stiU 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 
 
 27 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 pos- 
 sible for a human hand to obey us as precisely as 
 a human eye detects, the results on the can- 
 vas would be infinitely more valuable, first, be- 
 cause 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 af- 
 fecting not only the mass but the composition of 
 the picture, one mass of buildings being in Ught 
 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 
 28 
 
Composition 
 
 hours, in my experience, is all that a man can 
 be sure of. 
 
 We have, of course, the next day to con- 
 tinue in, but then the landscape has changed. 
 That delicate, transparent, gauzy cloud screen 
 that softened the sky Ught 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 Ught on every 
 object over which they float. The half you 
 painted yesterday, therefore, wiU 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 
 
 29 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 per- 
 form the great almanac trick successfully in 
 your sketch. But how about yourself? Are 
 you the same man to-day that you were yester- 
 day? If so, perhaps you might also find your- 
 self 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 
 30 
 
Composition 
 
 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 — ^nota- 
 bly the one first owned by the late Mr, Charles 
 A. Dana, of New York, called "Apollo," I be- 
 lieve — the treatment of the sky and foreground 
 shows careful repainting, and while the mechan- 
 ical process of the brush, shown by the over 
 and under paintmg, 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 
 
 31 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 re- 
 called. 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 quahty 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 spiaal 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 
 32 
 
Composition 
 
 vibrates thorough you for hours after; Booth 
 had it when drawing himself up to his full 
 height as Cardinal Richelieu he began that fa- 
 mous speech, "Around her form I draw the holy 
 circle of our faith" — ^his upraised finger a bar- 
 rier that an army could not break down; Ve- 
 lasquez, in his marvellous picture in the Mu- 
 seum 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 
 
 33 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 object (you propose to paint boats if you 
 please, and you have walked around them for 
 minutes trying to get the best view and decid- 
 ing upon the aU-important best possible com- 
 position) — ^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 can- 
 vas, in other words, composing them, the basis 
 being the most expansive and most picturesque 
 grouping of the several details of the sub- 
 34 
 
Composition 
 
 ject, 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 
 hve 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 
 
 35 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 re- 
 moved. 
 
 36 
 
MASS 
 
MASS 
 
 'T^HE 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 outUnes 
 either of varied color or in lights or darks, their 
 gradations but so many guides to the specta- 
 tor'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 fovmd 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. 
 
 39 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 To make this more explicit it is only neces- 
 sary 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 roxmd of the egg reflects the 
 light the highest light is found, while in the 
 edge of the shadow, where the egg turns into 
 the roimd — ^between that high light and the re- 
 flected 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, chiurch 
 tower, rock, palace, or ship imder full sail, is 
 the darkest object. In addition to this there 
 40 
 
Mass 
 
 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 composi- 
 tion these same lights and darks are echoed 
 and re-echoed in constantly decreasing grada- 
 tions. 
 
 You may apply these same tests ever3rwhere 
 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 Kght, while a 
 corresponding dark can always be found some- 
 where in the tree-trunks, under the overhang- 
 ing eaves, or in the broken crevices of the ma- 
 sonry. 
 
 So it is with every other expression of nature. 
 Even on a Venetian lagoon, where the sky and 
 
 41 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 de- 
 licious 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 sub- 
 ject-matter, as one of Raphael Morghen's en- 
 gravings 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 modem times is the picture by the dis- 
 tinguished Dutch painter, Mauve, known as 
 "Changing Pasture," which is now owned by 
 42 
 
Mass 
 
 Mr. Charles P. Taft, of Cincinnati. Here the 
 factor of mass is carried to its utmost hmit. 
 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 dis- 
 tance, 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 hght 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 fix- 
 ing your attention, often shrouding in shadow 
 the unimportant in the landscape, while high 
 up above the gloom it holds up to your gaze a 
 
 43 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 medimn-sized picture of some coryphees 
 painted by Degas, now an old man over eighty 
 years old — a subject which he always loved 
 and, indeed, which he has painted many times. 
 Some thirty years ago, when he was compar- 
 atively a young man, I saw, at the Bartholdi 
 exhibition in New York, a picture by this master 
 of these same coryphees, two figures standing 
 together in the flies resting their weary, pink, 
 fishworm legs as they balanced themselves 
 with their hands against the wabbling scenery. 
 It was a wholly gray picture, and almost in a 
 monotone, and yet the flashes of their diamond 
 44 
 
Mass 
 
 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 Wert- 
 heimer, the bric-a-brac dealer, if you remember, 
 the eye first catches the strong vermilion touch 
 on the lower Up, and then, knowing that a mas- 
 ter like Sargent would not leave it isolated, 
 one finds, to one's deUght and joy, a Httle 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, Van- 
 dyck, and Frans Hals, especially where a face 
 is reUeved by the addition of a hand and the 
 white of a ruflf. Somewhere in that warm ex- 
 panse of the face there can be found a pin- 
 
 45 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 head 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 ruflf; but slight as it is and un- 
 noticeable 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 pre- 
 served, 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 
 46 
 
Mass 
 
 the painter is skilful enough in the manage- 
 ment of the remaining lesser lights and darks, 
 the eye will run through the gradations to the 
 end, reboimding 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 manage- 
 ment — 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 
 47 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 mind that marvellous picture of the so-called 
 literary school of England, a picture by Luke 
 Fildes known as "The Doctor" and now hang- 
 ing 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 
 pecviliarities of the so-called art-loving public 
 of to-day, notably that section which insists 
 that no picture should teU 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 fel- 
 48 
 
Mass 
 
 lows," 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 Fortimy's earhest patrons, had invited 
 Whistler to his house in Paris to see his col- 
 lection, 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 mon- 
 ocle and said: "Oh, yes, very good — snuff-box 
 style." 
 
 This affectation was to have been expected 
 of Whistler because of his aggressive mental 
 
 49 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 attitude toward the work of any man who han- 
 dled 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 Conti- 
 nental art, noting their dawn of novelty, their 
 sunrise of appreciation, their high noon of tri- 
 umph, their afternoon of neglect, and their 
 night of oblivion, to be convinced that the wheel 
 of artistic appreciation is round hke other 
 wheels — the world, for one — ^and that its revo- 
 lutions bring the night as surely as they bring 
 the dawn. 
 
 5° 
 
Mass 
 
 Not a himdred years have passed since the 
 broad, sensuous work of Turner, big in con- 
 ception 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 in- 
 sisted that they had counted the leaves on their 
 ehn-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 Himter, 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 for- 
 getfulness, 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, 
 
 SI 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 however, are valuable, and to-day one touch 
 of Turner's brush is more sought for than acres 
 of canvases so greatly prized twenty years after 
 his death. 
 
 And this is not alone confined to the old 
 realistic English school. In my own time I 
 have seen Verbeckoeven eclipsed by Van 
 Marcke, Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Gerome by 
 Manet, and Sir Frederick Leighton by John 
 Sargent — a young David slaying the Goliath of 
 English tedmic 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 imderstanding of and ad- 
 herence 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. 
 52 
 
Mass 
 
 In the late half of the pfeceding century Meis- 
 sonier 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 at- 
 tendant 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 bet- 
 ter. Forty years later SoroUa received $20,000 
 for two figures in blazing sunlight which took 
 him but two days to paint, the rest of his collec- 
 tion 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 stiU in the fuU tide of success, pre-emi- 
 nently the greatest master of the out-of-doors of 
 modem times, while to-day the work of Meis- 
 sonier has fallen into such disrepute that no 
 owner dares offer one of his canvases at public 
 auction except imder the keenest necessity. 
 The first master expresses the refinement of ex- 
 treme realism, or rather detailism; the other is a 
 
 S3 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 pronounced impressionist of the sanest of the 
 open-air school of to-day. How long this pen- 
 dulum wiU 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 
 54 
 
Mass 
 
 shimmer of the blue, overarching sky, beating 
 up and down and over the figures, and all de- 
 picted 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 knowl- 
 edge 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. f In the second Sorolla presents 
 but a series of shorthand notes which you your- 
 self can fill in to sviit 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 dec- 
 ade a single Meissonier may be worth its weight 
 in sheet gold and layers of Sorollas may be 
 stored in attics awaiting some fortunate auction. 
 
 55 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 Utters 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 SoroUa's eclipse, but you may. 
 Yoii 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 
 56 
 
Mass 
 
 nothing to do with either selection, compo- 
 sition, 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 talk- 
 ing, so to speak — and therefore becomes an in- 
 tegral 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 tr)dng to get 
 a glimpse of a picture of half a dozen red prel- 
 ates 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 disap- 
 pointed when they could not read the monogram 
 on the bishop's ring. Later on, a highly culti- 
 vated and intelligent American citizen was so 
 entranced that he bought the missionary, story 
 and all, for the price of a brown-stone front, and 
 
 57 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 under- 
 stand 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 ex- 
 ception 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." 
 S8 
 
Mass 
 
 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 modem 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 ten- 
 derness. 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 
 
 59 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 soUd, using bitumen as an under- 
 tone, 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 hand- 
 writing. "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 
 60 
 
Mass 
 
 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 ex- 
 pressing 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 Diisseldorf 
 ready writers, or the modern French pothook 
 and hanger, or the antiquated Dutch. He can 
 use the English of Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or 
 Josh BUlings, at his own good pleasure. If he 
 conveys an inteUigible idea he has accom- 
 
 6i 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 plished 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 indiflferent con- 
 taining each or combining both. 
 
 Realism, or, to express it more clearly, de- 
 tailism, 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 
 tjTpe 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 
 imtil every nail in the handle and every crack 
 in the blade became apparent. 
 62 
 
Mass 
 
 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 Uved 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 rever- 
 ently; that the spade is merely a sjonbol of 
 labor; that he used it as he would use a word 
 necessary to express a sentence, which would 
 be iminteUigible 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. 
 
 63 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 individu- 
 aUty? If so, which individual by his methods 
 teUs 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 
 agamst 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 per- 
 sonaUty and forget my surroundings, and when 
 opportunity offers I can express upon my can- 
 vas the few salient facts which impressed me 
 and should impress my fellow men. If it is 
 64 
 
Mass 
 
 the sUvery 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 hem- 
 lock. Were the rocks all perpendicular, or did 
 not detached bowlders line the path? About 
 the clouds, were they not some small cirri be- 
 neath 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 par- 
 es 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 ticular 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 magnifjdng-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 impres- 
 sion 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 in- 
 vited to a feast and that I have pried into 
 mysteries which my goddess would veil from 
 66 
 
Mass 
 
 my sight; that I have had the impertinence 
 to bring my own personal advice into the dis- 
 cussion; that I have insisted that fissures, and 
 leaves, and sand, and infinite detail were neces- 
 sary 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 can- 
 not 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 
 
 67 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 aU. 
 And it is enough. The annoyances of the day, 
 the seductions of fresh imprtessions of newer 
 subjects, the weakness of the flesh do not deter 
 him. With a single aim, to the exclusion of 
 all else, and with a direct simplicity, he records 
 what he saw, and lo ! we have a poem. Such a 
 man was Courbet, Corot, Dupre. 
 
 But one would say: That may answer for 
 landscape: what about the figure-painter? Let 
 us coxmsel 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 
 68 
 
Mass 
 
 their own way. They are the Dickens and Wal- 
 ter 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 weU told — the well-fed prelates; the 
 half -sneer; the cynical smile; the earnest mis- 
 sionary telling his experience. But the next 
 day? — ^well, he is still telliag it. By the end 
 of the week the enjoyment is confined to allow- 
 ing 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 decora- 
 tion of the wall. You perhaps feel that the 
 frame needs retouching, and that is all the im- 
 pression it makes upon you, except as would 
 
 69 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 an old timepiece with the mainspring gone. The 
 works are exquisite and the enamelling charm- 
 ing, 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 th« treatment; it is 
 the subject. One moment. The missionary's 
 story is as full of pathos and of himian suf- 
 fering 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 
 70 
 
Mass 
 
 his confidence. He says: "Come, see what I 
 once saw. Do you ever remember any such 
 couple working in the field?" And you im- 
 mediately, and unconsciously to yourself, re- 
 meinber just such a bent back and reverent, 
 xmcovered head. Where, you cannot teU, for 
 the pictiire 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 imconsciously, to add your own 
 sweet memory to the picture. 
 
 Another impression choked to death with 
 unnecessary reaUsm. 
 
 But be you realist or impressionist, remember 
 that a true work of art is that which has pleased 
 
 71 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 the greatest number of people for the longest 
 period of time; that the love of beauty indi- 
 cates our highest intellectual plane, and that if 
 you will express to your fellow sinners bur- 
 dened with life's cares something of the enthu- 
 siasm of your own hfe, 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. 
 
 72 
 
WATER-CX)LORS 
 
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 grada- 
 tion as the waves of soimd and light. Even 
 in the grayest days, when the clouds are burst- 
 ing into tears and the whole landscape is deso- 
 late as the barrenest and bleakest of mountain 
 sides, these infinite gradations of color per- 
 meate and redeem its barrenness, and to the 
 true painter fill it with joy and beauty. 
 
 75 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 be- 
 loved Mark Twain, whose heart was always 
 open to the best and warmest of human im- 
 pressions, 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 sun- 
 set sky, the whole reflected in a troubled sea, 
 remarked to his companion: "Very wonderful! 
 Seen it before. Always reminds me of a tor- 
 toise-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 thinn we do. For 
 
 true color is as great an educator as true music. 
 
 76 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 This knowledge of color harmony, this match- 
 ing 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 en- 
 ters into, have their exact counterpart in some 
 color tones of nature — that the russet-browns 
 and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opal- 
 escent 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, woiild make beauti- 
 
 77 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 ful anything in the world from a bonnet to a 
 chateau. To illustrate: 
 
 Several years ago an intimate friend of mine, 
 a distinguished architect of New York, the late 
 Mr. Bruce Price, in designing a number of 
 cottages at Tuxedo sought in vain for some 
 color mixture, current in the paint-shops with 
 which to cover the outside of his buildings. 
 All schemes of browns, oUve-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 Uttle skill with 
 his brush, but he had that innate good taste, 
 with a keen eye to discern the subtle grada- 
 tions in color, that only needed change of occu- 
 pation to make him a painter. One day, look- 
 ing at a new bare wooden cottage — unpainted 
 78 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 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 him- 
 self: "The tree-trunks and underbrush do not 
 stand out; they are all of one piece, each keep- 
 ing 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 prac- 
 tical 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, 
 
 79 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 modem 
 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 Mont^nard 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 
 So 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 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. 
 
 8i 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 It does not seem to me that I can better illus- 
 trate 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 col- 
 orings of nature. I select Inness not only be- 
 cause 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 morn- 
 ing to twilight, expressing these truthfully, ab- 
 solutely, perfectly, so far as local color is con- 
 cerned — 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 
 82 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 blue-black, and with these two colors he ex- 
 presses 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 ex- 
 pressed. The most important of these is the 
 time of day. To an outdoor painter — an ex- 
 pert 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 sha,dows just how high the sim 
 was in the heavens, and he knows, too, from 
 the local color of the shadows whether it is 
 a silvery Uglit 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 bal- 
 cony upon a white wall is a perfect sun-dial for 
 
 83 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 him, and this test can be indefinitely applied 
 to every part of the picture. 
 
 The next is the temperature: how hot or 
 how cold it was — ^what month in the year? It 
 is unnecessary for Inness to cover his ground 
 with snow to make his picture express a cer- 
 tain degree of cold, neither is it necessary for 
 Montenard to fill his Provengal 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 look- 
 ing 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 Mon- 
 t6nard'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 
 
 84 
 
H 
 
 c 
 o 
 
 J3 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 u 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 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 move- 
 ment 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. 
 
 8S 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 
 86 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 English school to the men bom between the 
 years 1720 and 1820. 
 
 In this group he places the great Gainsbor- 
 ough, who from 1760 to 1774 worked "in char- 
 coal and water-color on tinted paper," which 
 he said he "loved to dash oflE of an evening, 
 and which dazzled the fine ladies and gentle- 
 men who frequented the select watering-place 
 of Bath," where he was then living. 
 
 Then came Robert Cozens, the brothers 
 Sanby, Thomas Heame, Thomas Malton, Sam- 
 uel Scott, and a few others, all known as the 
 eighteenth-century painters. 
 
 These were succeeded by Thomas Girtin, 
 who was bom 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 bom — namely, April 23 — a day dedi- 
 cated to St. George and the birthday of Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare. 
 
 87 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 free- 
 dom 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 earher life as an ex- 
 treme 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 unnec- 
 essary 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 mem- 
 bers of the first Water Color Society formed in 
 88 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 England, in 1804, which body still survives in 
 the old Water Color Society whose rooms are 
 still open on Pall Mall East) rose into prom- 
 inence, their works finding places both in pri- 
 vate 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 181 2 — a victim, 
 says Hughes, of the condition of public apathy 
 which brought about in the same year a re- 
 construction of the older organization under 
 the joint title of the Oil and Water Color 
 Society, and which eked out a precarious ex- 
 istence 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 
 
 89 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 water-color, or rather a new technic in its 
 handling. What Ruskin, the realist, in his 
 "Modem 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 lajdng on of 
 the color in washes which filled certain defi- 
 nite 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 re- 
 quired 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 dis- 
 90 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 tinctive 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 modem 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 saUva'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 Field- 
 ing; Prout, with his picturesque sepia draw- 
 ings, [the detail of his architecture in brown 
 ink; Harding; Bennington, really a great man; 
 
 91 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 Clarkson Stanfield; Rowbotham; David Rob- 
 erts; James Holland; Cattermole, who de- 
 clined 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 sub- 
 ject, of course, is too well known for long dis- 
 cussion. Our oldest society, the American 
 Water Color Society, held its first public ex- 
 hibition 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, 1 was 
 92 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 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 Bliun, 
 F. S. Church, Cooper, Curran, Eaton, Farrer, 
 the two SmiUies, Childe Hassam, Keller, Mur- 
 phy, NicoU, Potthast, the late Henry Smith, 
 etc., etc. 
 
 93 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 EngUsh water-color 
 school — and I make the statement with every 
 respect for their high accompUshments — ^whUe 
 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 English- 
 men 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 some- 
 body else. They all want to paint like them- 
 selves, or they do not want to paint at all. 
 94 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 They are so many art sponges. They go abroad, 
 wander about the Grosvenor and the exhibi- 
 tions, run over to Paris and haunt the Salon 
 and shops, and so on to Munich and BerUn, 
 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 
 beheve in each other sufficiently to pay the 
 highest form of flattery — limitation. 
 
 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 simmier-time is dominated by his 
 two children, both exiles, and more exactingly 
 still in late years by two Kttle grandboys who 
 have not as yet crossed the ocean. No, these 
 
 95 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 young American painters, with hardly an ex- 
 ception, 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-boimd coasts breaking the full surge of 
 an ocean; with forests of towering trees com- 
 pared to which in girth and height the trees 
 of aU other lands are but toothpicks; with plains 
 ending in films of blue haze and valleys spark- 
 ling with myriads of waterfalls; with every 
 type of the human race blended in our own, or 
 96 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 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 Hve 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 sub- 
 ject, for instance, is more worthy of a great 
 master's brush than Homer's "Undertow," two 
 half-drowned yoimg bathers locked in each 
 other's arms, the two beachmen dragging them 
 clear of the mighty, blue-green wave curving be- 
 hind 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, 
 
 97 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 was the first clear note Homer had sounded. 
 The "Prisoners to the Front," painted just 
 after the war, was a strong, reaUstic 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 fine; dotted here and there, bending 
 over the bolls, were groups of negroes, singly 
 and in pairs, filling their bags; in the fore- 
 ground walked two young negro girls, the 
 foremost a dark mulatto — the whole story of 
 Southern slavery written in every line of her 
 patient, imcomplaining 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 
 98 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 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 any- 
 thing 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 aflEects, 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, senti- 
 ment, and technic — ^yes, technic, for this pic- 
 ture was superbly painted — "The Cotton Pick- 
 
 99 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 ers," 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 archi- 
 tecture, 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 jiury 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 Acad- 
 emician when the question was broached. 
 
 Whistler never foimd a vacant spot, no mat- 
 ter how high, where he could hang even a 
 lO X 14. 
 
 100 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 "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 modem 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 Exhi- 
 bition, as I do every summer, and have con- 
 tinued to do for the past thirty years. 
 
 And this adherence to tradition is not con- 
 fined entirely to technic — I refer now to many 
 of the EngUsh 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 selec- 
 tion of a subject is as dangerous as a departure 
 
 lOI 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 conform- 
 ing to the standard. Three years ago I was 
 painting near a village, an hour from Padding- 
 ton — a lovely spot on the River Thames. This 
 quaint settlement is one of those little, wa- 
 terside, old-fashioned-inn places, aU drooping 
 trees, punts, millions of roses, tumble-dowi 
 cottages, stretches of meadows with the silver 
 thread of the Thames glistening in the sun- 
 light. 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 
 
 I02 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 to about everybody who has ever visited that 
 section of England. 
 
 I had been there for a week, making my head- 
 quarters at the White Hart, when my atten- 
 tion was attracted to a man across the river 
 — ^it is quite narrow here — a painter, evidently, 
 who seemed to be surroimded by a collection 
 of canvases. He went through the same mo- 
 tions 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 pic- 
 ture of the old brick bridge. 
 f "But why eight all alike?" I asked in as- 
 tonishment. 
 
 "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 se- 
 lection of a subject, in its treatment, or in its 
 handling, that I have but Uttle sympathy, even 
 103 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 though the great Ruskin, m 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 ex- 
 isted," 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 state- 
 ments, 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 Accademia 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 
 104 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 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 
 dose range. This experience has taught me 
 that weight and solidity are as important in the 
 rendering of a natural object as air and per- 
 spective, and that the staining of paper with 
 washes of transparent color does not and can- 
 not give them. 
 
 Nor can any brilliant light, a crisp, snapping 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 Uke 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 express- 
 ing a high light. 
 
 Nor mil a single dab of Chinese white pro- 
 duce the effect of it, should it be the only dab 
 of opaque white in the composition. The re- 
 sult 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 oc- 
 curs when the opaque color forms part of the 
 whole, the two systems blending each with the 
 other. To illustrate, my own experience has 
 io6 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 taught me that in nature whatever the sun 
 shines upon is opaque. The fagade of a ca- 
 thedral, 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 re- 
 flections of the sky or the reflected lights from 
 near-by objects, are invariably transparent. 
 
 And now for my own system and the rea- 
 sons 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 coiurse, that 
 I do not ask you students to follow in my foot- 
 steps if your predilections, training, and innate 
 consciences lead you to a different view of treat- 
 ment. Many of you may not like my work at 
 aU, 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 
 107 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 EngUsh 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 re- 
 sults 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: 
 io8 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 "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 col- 
 lection wiU 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 pubUc; 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 pubUc 
 opinion. It is not new to our age. Diaz, so 
 109 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 one story goes, once came stumping (he had lost 
 one leg) into Millet's cottage at Barbizon fresh 
 from the Salon. MiUet had been painting 
 nudes — the most exquisite bits of flesh-painting 
 seen for many a day, and as modest as Chabas 
 "September Mom." 
 
 "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 scur- 
 rilous 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 
 no 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 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 asso- 
 ciates." 
 
 And now for my own system. 
 I use a heavy, gray charcoal paper, which is 
 III 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 made by Dupr6 & Company, No. 141 Fau- 
 bourg St. Honor6, Paris, and which costs about 
 ten cents per sheet, measuring about 40x30 
 inches each. This paper is evenly ribbed but 
 without the intermittent bands seen often in 
 the lighter charcoal paper, known as "Miche- 
 let," sold everywhere in our own art stores. 
 Dupr6 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 fidl 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 
 gmn shellac, thrown by means of a common 
 112 
 
Water-Colors 
 
 perfume atomizer, the whole apparatus cost- 
 ing 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 imder 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 simlight, it is a 
 dull, golden yellow and reflects the yellow glow 
 of the sand beneath. Or it may be a blue re- 
 flection, 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 imder charcoal, and yet keep it 
 transparent (all shadows being transparent) and 
 at the same time preserve its true and proper tint. 
 "3 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 This glaze is done by using the three semi- 
 opaque primary pigments — ^f ound 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 inter- 
 mediate 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 
 dogging or mudd3dng 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 pre- 
 serving the all-important thing — its trans- 
 parency. 
 
 114 
 
Water-Colprs 
 
 In conclusion, let me say that I fully rec- 
 ognize 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 com- 
 mon 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 
 "5 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 tubes, my Chinese white being heaped up in a 
 httle mound near my thumb. 
 
 The result may be seen in some of the illus- 
 trations accompanying this text. 
 
 ii6 
 
CHARCOAL 
 
CHARCOAL 
 
 "DEFORE going into the value of charcoal 
 -*-' as a medium in the recording of the va- 
 rious 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 con- 
 nection 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 il- 
 lustration in Harper's Magazine of the late fif- 
 ties 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 
 119 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 awaken- 
 ing to the necessity of better work from the 
 bvirin, followed by an enormous commercial 
 demand for such results, imtil by common 
 cons'ent 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 
 120 
 
Charcoal 
 
 draftsman, as was the case with "Porte Cray- 
 on'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 Diirer 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 draw- 
 ing required, or left comparatively untouched. 
 
 121 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 It is not my purpose to discuss here the 
 different merits of the different schools. There 
 are varieties of opinion regarding the excel- 
 lence 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 or- 
 ganization well known in New York, and per- 
 haps to many of you, as the Tile Club, to which 
 
 122 
 
Charcoal 
 
 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-engrav- 
 ing 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. 
 
 123 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 With this discovery, however, of making 
 available even the roughest drawing, the sim- 
 plest 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 art- 
 ists — 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 de- 
 veloped rapidly. The third requirement, of 
 taste and intelligence, was found in Mr. A. W. . 
 124 
 
Charcoal 
 
 Drake, then art director of Scribner's Monthly, 
 and, after its merging into the Century, the dis- 
 tinguished art director of the Century Magazine. 
 When the Tile Club was formed in New York 
 it consisted of a group of men (l was its scullion 
 for seven years, its entire life, and, being thus 
 an honored servant, was familiar with its many 
 aflfairs) who represented at the time the lead- 
 ing 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 hmited to eighteen mem- 
 bers, there being twelve painters and six musi- 
 cians. 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 
 
 125 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 <tf ^drawng 
 for Scribner^s Monthly was first inooted, 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 in- 
 fluence 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, illus- 
 trated 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 
 126 
 
Charcoal 
 
 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, YuengUng, took 
 the gold medal of excellence both in Paris 
 and Munich. 
 
 With this difference in textures, the differ- 
 ence between a drawing in charcoal and one 
 made in oil, it became necessary to invent new 
 modes of expression with the burin. A sim- 
 ple 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 sub- 
 tle 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. 
 
 127 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 Uke Yuengling or Cole. Again pho- 
 tography was called into use. The "straight 
 process," so called, of the phototype printer, re- 
 producing a pen-and-ink line drawing on a zinc 
 plate which could be immediately run through 
 a Hoe process, was perfected. You all remem- 
 ber, doubtiess, an illustrated daily published 
 128 
 
Charcoal 
 
 in New York, called The Daily Graphic, illus- 
 trated 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 neces- 
 sary 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 aU 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 
 129 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 
 lajdng 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 Ught 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 de- 
 merits, one of which was the total extermina- 
 tion of the American wood-engraver, except for 
 130 
 
Charcoal 
 
 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 com- 
 position — ^for, of course, the light specks are 
 everywhere, thus lightening and grajdng 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 
 131 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 Leech's immortal caricatures in Punch to the 
 reproductions, all because the shadow line im- 
 der an eye, or that Uttle 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 imiformity of tone, the certainty 
 of every touch being reproduced, the exact 
 balancing from dark to light, all residt in bet- 
 ter work than can be done by the ordinary en- 
 graver. 
 
 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, 
 132 
 
Charcoal 
 
 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 earUer 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 draw- 
 ings now on exhibition in the adjoining gallery. 
 So perfect is the reproduction that one is care- 
 ful not to smudge his fingers in turning the 
 133 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 illus- 
 trators — 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, simrises and simsets, blazing heat and 
 cool, transparent shadows, that cannot be visu- 
 alized 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 wip- 
 134 
 
Charcoal 
 
 ing 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 fore- 
 finger 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 ex- 
 perience 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 fin- 
 ^55 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 ished in two hours it cannot be finished by 
 the same man in two days or two years. 
 
 For a drawing in charcoal is really a record 
 of a man's temperament. It represents pre- 
 eminently the personahty 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 him- 
 self, 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 
 
 136 
 
a 
 o 
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 hJ 
 
 n 
 
 -a 
 a 
 
 O 
 H 
 
 «> 
 
 ,-*l 
 
 > 
 
 
 K. 
 
 
 
 ^"l 
 
 
 5- \ 
 
 4 I 
 "5; 
 
Charcoal 
 
 blow going from the spinal column, not the 
 pitapat of a jeweller's hammer elaborating the 
 repoussg 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 Ught 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 tmtold mysteries in Rembrandt's 
 137 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 shadows which his friends failed to see when 
 his canvas left his studio. It is the unex- 
 pressed which is often most interesting. Meis- 
 sonier 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 ex- 
 pressed, 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 build- 
 ings, come first, especially if it be raining; and 
 138 
 
Charcoal 
 
 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, 
 uttle rivulets of molten silver escaping every- 
 where. When with these you get a back- 
 ground — 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 fore- 
 ground 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. Bar- 
 tholomew's the Great, over in Smithfield. 
 Other churches have I studied in my wan- 
 139 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 derings; many and various cathedrals, basilicas, 
 and mosques have delighted me. I know the 
 color and the value of tapestry and rich hang- 
 ings; of mosaics, porphyry, and verd-antiques; 
 of fluted alabaster and the delicate tracery of 
 the arabesque; but the velvety quality of Lon- 
 don soot when applied to the rough surfaces 
 of rudely chiselled stones, and the soft loveli- 
 ness gained by grime and smoke, came to me 
 as a revelation. 
 
 This rich black which, like a tropical fimgus, 
 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, mellow- 
 ing 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 
 140 
 
Charcoal 
 
 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 trans- 
 mit 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 Lon- 
 don after the fogs and soot of one winter have 
 wreaked their vengeance upon it. Whether 
 the fagade is of brick, stone, or stucco depends 
 141 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 Burling- 
 ton House, where a head, arm, or part of a 
 pedestal chair has been kept white by constant 
 douches. 
 
 As for me, I was glad that these old haunts 
 of Mr. Thackeray and his characters are even 
 blacker to-day than they might have been in 
 his time. For the soot and ,grime become 
 them, and London as well, for that matter. A 
 great impressionist, this smoke-smudger and 
 wiper-out of detail, this beUever in masses and 
 simple surfaces, this destroyer of gingerbread or- 
 naments, 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. 
 
 142 
 
Pure grit 
 
 With use of 
 thunib 
 
 With use of 
 cotton rag 
 
 Witli use nf 
 
 buckskin 
 
 stump 
 
 Ilard cind 
 soft dialk 
 
 The above cleaned spots 
 arc obtained by use of 
 ductile rubber 
 
 Diagram of Charcoal Tcchnic 
 
Charcoal 
 
 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 strong- 
 est stroke of the coal. The gray of this paper 
 serves as the middle tone of the drawing, the 
 diflEerent 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 de- 
 tails into clear relief, the several larger grada- 
 tions 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 
 
 143 
 
Outdoor Sketching 
 
 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 ob- 
 ject. 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 atmos- 
 pheric 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 han- 
 dling of the coal. 
 
 These planes being secured, any light higher 
 than the prevailing rubbed-in tone can be 
 144 
 
Charcoal 
 
 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 efifects, 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 baflfliing 
 to the layman. 
 
 I4S