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THE ESSENTIALS OF PRACTICE

right objects as trees or the corners of buildings, or a deliberately introduced pillar or obelisk, or a cloud which does not form a part of the immediate subject of his work; and this will make two or more compositions out of one in such a way that two or three separate points of view may be established.

IV. The painter habitually gives just so much of natural fact as he thinks his immediate purpose requires, and no more. He often combines such facts in novel ways without waiting for the direct suggestion of nature. This is equally true whether he is painting his picture out of doors, like Turner working in Switzerland or Corot at Fontainebleau, or in the studio from studies and from memories. It is equally true whether he is working upon landscape subject or figure subject, with this difference, that many painters are hardly able to dispense with the living model as they work, while others work much without the presence of a living model and then call in the living model to correct their work. This subject has been discussed at length in connection with sculpture, for which see Chapter XXIV.

Except where portraiture is the express purpose of the work, the painter's instinct will generally keep him from representing very accurately any object or person, because the whole work of art must be kept consistent and in harmony. Thus in a quasi-historical picture, in which, say, Napoleon

should appear, the painter will often find the most serious difficulty in so placing his exceptionally famous personage that the whole work may be kept from being a mere setting to that single figure. Even a tree, chosen because a special favorite of the artist's "patron" or of the artist himself, will be a dangerous incident in a painting of landscape. It will be seen how closely this principle allies itself with the other principle of the rejection of all imitation.

To imitate nothing visible nor even desire to

do so.

To give the essential and noble truth about all manner of visible things.

To select in preference very interesting things, those which reveal many essential and noble truths.

To attain to great manual skill and profound knowledge, in order to be always ready, always prompt, and to lose no time.

Such a mental and physical course of life is what the representative painter proposes to himself.

PART IV

THE FINE ARTS NOT OF HAND-WORK

Chapter Twenty-Six

DECORATIVE TREATMENT OF BUILDINGS

T

HE position of architecture among the other fine arts is extremely difficult to explain or to understand clearly. Chapter XIV was devoted to building as a manual art and as the origin and source of all that is interesting in architecture, but in that chapter nothing could be said of the nonmanual side of architecture. This side of the art is, however, a most important one. An Egyptian temple was planned according to a never disregarded tradition, and the general character of the battering walls and the hollow cove of the cornice, the peculiar forms of pylon and propylon, were not to be varied. The manner in which sculpture was applied to the walls and in which that sculpture was afterwards painted in bright colors was a settled thing which no innovator would dare to meddle with. The Egyptians may be said to have had four "orders" of columnar architecture, even as the Greeks had two; but the Egyptian evolution went on for four thousand years of independent nationality, or ten times the

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