Francis Hopkinson Smith

“ All nature rests. It is her noontime.
But you work on: an enthusiasm has taken possession of you; the paints mix too slowly; you use your thumb, smearing and blending with a bit of rag—anything for the effect. One moment you are glued to your seat, your eyes riveted on your canvas; the next, you are up and backing away, taking it in as a whole, [8] then pouncing down upon it quickly, belaboring it with your brush. Soon the trees take shape; the sky forms become definite; the meadow lies flat and loses itself in the fringe of willows. ”

“ On one bank stretches a row of rookeries—a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other is the long brick wall of the garden—soggy, begrimed, streaked with moss and lichen in bands of black-green and yellow ochre, over which mass and sway the great sycamores that Ziem loved, their lower branches interwoven with cinnobar cedars gleaming in spots where the prying sun drips gold. ”

“ Color, if you stop to think, is really the decorative touch which God gives to the universe. It would have been just as easy to make everything gray—every rose but the shadow of itself—every tree and rock and cloud a monotone of gradation. Instead of that, everything we look at, from a violet to an overbending sky, is enriched and glorified by millions of color tones as infinite in their gradation as the waves of sound and light. ”

“ When with these you get a background—and I always do—of flat masses of quaint buildings, all detail lost in the haze and mist of smoke, your delight rises to enthusiasm. Nowhere else in the world are the "values" so marvellously preserved. You start your foreground with, say, a figure, or an umbrella, or a cab, expressed in a stroke of jet-black, and the perspective instantly fades into grays of steeple, dome, or roof, so delicate and vapory that there is hardly a shade of difference between earth and sky. ”

“ Certain it is that no other medium than the one used could give any idea of its charm. Neither oil, water-color, nor pastel will transmit it—no, nor the dry-point or bitten plate. The soot of centuries, the fogs of countless Novembers, the smoke of a thousand firesides were the pigments which the Master Painter set upon his palette in the task of giving us one exquisitely beautiful interior wholly in black-and-white. ”

“ If it is [65] the silvery light of the morning, I am Corot; if the day is gone and across the cool lagoon I see the ripple amid the tall grass catching the fading color of the warm sky, I am Daubigny; if a gray mist hangs over the hillside and the patches of snow half melted express the warmth and mellowness of the coming spring, I am our own Inness. ”

“ The difference between composition and mass is that a composition is a mere outline of pen or pencil, each object taking its proper place in the square of a canvas, while mass is the filling in between these outlines either of varied color or in lights or darks, their gradations but so many guides to the spectator's eye marking not only its perspective, form and atmosphere, but, if skilfully done, telling the story of your subject at a glance. ”

“ The great sweep of vision, a sweep covering a hundred subjects perhaps, is obtained by turning the eyes up or down or sideways. But to be true—that is, to see one picture at a time—the eye should be fixed like the lens of a camera, the limit of the picture being the range of the eye and no more. A departure from this rule not only confuses your perspective but crowds a number of points of interest into the square of your canvas, when there is really only one centre point before you in nature ”

“ The rest of the world wear blue and purple, or orange and green, entirely ignorant of the harmonies of nature even as bearing on their domestic surroundings. For myself, I have always held that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration, furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into, have their exact counterpart in some color tones of nature—that the russet-browns and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues of a morning sky, rose-pink, pale blue, or delicate tea-rose yellow ”

“ If it is a street, and if you wish to express its perspective, and the bit of blue sky beyond, with a burst of sunlight illumining the corner, the figures crowded against the light, forming a mass in themselves, and it interests you at a glance, sit down and study it long enough to find out what feature of the landscape impressed you at first sight. ”

“ You can turn, if you choose, your camera skyward and focus the top of a steeple and only that. It is true, but it is uninteresting, or rather unintelligible, until you focus also the church door, and the gathering groups, and the overgrown pathway that winds through the quiet graveyard. So a picture can be true and yet very much like a slip cut from a newspaper. For some men cut thus into nature, haphazard, without care or thought, and produce perhaps a square containing an advertisement of a patent churn, a railroad timetable, and a fragment of an essay on art. ”

“ Even in the grayest days, when the clouds are bursting into tears and the whole landscape is desolate as the barrenest and bleakest of mountain sides, these infinite gradations of color permeate and redeem its barrenness, and to the true painter fill it with joy and beauty. [76]
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 in a gray day, when the sun is not so positive a factor in distributing light, and the shadows are so subtle that it is difficult to discover them, there is always some mass of foliage, the silver sheen from an old shingled roof, the glare of a white wall, which marks for the composition its lightest light, while a corresponding dark can always be found somewhere in the tree-trunks, under the overhanging eaves, or in the broken crevices of the masonry. ”

“ I select Inness not only because he is to me one of the great landscape-painters of his day, but because he chooses a very wide range of subjects, from early morning to twilight, expressing these truthfully, absolutely, perfectly, so far as local color is concerned—that is, of course, as I see through either my own spectacles or Inness's; but, then, remember, our eyes may need repair. When these canvases are analyzed we find in the range of color nothing stronger than yellow ochre in yellows, than light red in reds, and, with hardly an exception, blue-black for blues. ”

“ Note, too, the sketches of Frans Hals and see what power comes from the sure touch of a well-directed brush in the hand of a man who used it to express his thoughts as other men use chords of music or paragraphs in literature. A man who made no false moves, who knew that every stroke of his brush must express a perfect sentence and that it could never be recalled. Really the work of such a master is like the gesture of an actor—if it is right a thrill goes through you, if it is wrong it is like that player friend of Hamlet's who sawed the air. ”

“ One man from natural defects may see all her greens or reds stronger or weaker than another in proportion to the condition of his eye. Another may grasp only her varying degrees of gray. One man unduly exaggerates the intensity of the dark and the opposing brilliancy of the lights. Another eye—for it is largely a question of optics, of optics and temperament—sees only the more gentle and sometimes the more subtle gradations of light and shade reducing even the blaze of the noonday sun to half-tones. ”

“ There are moments in all phenomena like these where a great man rising to the occasion can catch them exactly, as did Rousseau in the golden glow of the fading light through the forest, or Corot in the crisp light of the morning, or Daubigny in the low twilight across the sunken marshes where one can almost hear the frogs croak.
Selection, then, preceded by the deepest and closest thought as to whether the subject is worth painting at all, becomes necessary, the student giving himself plenty of time to study it in all its phases ”

“ 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 [69] their own way. They are the Dickens and Walter Scott of art. It is iteration and reiteration. My cardinal must not only have red stockings, says Vibert, but they must be silk; every detail must be elaborated. Very well, what of it? you say. What do you criticise, the drawing? No. The color? No. The composition? No. Does the painter express himself? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Indeed, his usual palette, as does Mauve's and Cazin's, seems to me to be only yellow ochre and [83] blue-black, and with these two colors he expresses the whole range of the color scheme in nature, with the varying lights of day and night, except in depicting sunsets.
After the salient features of a landscape have been analyzed and recorded in color, the more subtle qualities are to be detected and expressed. The most important of these is the time of day. To an outdoor painter—an expert examining the work of another expert—the hour-hand is written over every square inch of the canvas. ”

“ Speaking for myself, I must admit that the value of technic has never impressed me as have the other and greater qualities in a picture—namely, its expression of truth and the message it carries of beauty and often tenderness. I have always held that it is of no moment to the world at large by what means and methods an artist expresses himself ”

“ One has only to review several of the schools, both in English and in Continental art, noting their dawn of novelty, their sunrise of appreciation, their high noon of triumph, their afternoon of neglect, and their night of oblivion, to be convinced that the wheel of artistic appreciation is round like other wheels—the world, for one—and that its revolutions bring the night as surely as they bring the dawn. ”

“ Realism, or, to express it more clearly, detailism, is the realizing of the whole subject-matter or motive of a picture in exact detail. Impressionism is the generalizing of the subject-matter as a whole and the expression of only its salient features.
The extreme realist or detailist of the Ruskin type has for years been insisting that a spade was a spade and should be painted to look like a spade; that a spade was not a spade until every nail in the handle and every crack in the blade became apparent. ”

“ All schemes of browns, olive-greens, colonial yellow with white trimmings and the reverse, Pompeiian reds, slate-grays, and dull yellows resulted in making "spots" of the houses, so that the effect he wished to produce, that of the houses being merged into the forest, was lost. Mr. Price was not only an architect, but he was an artist as well. He had little skill with his brush, but he had that innate good taste, with a keen eye to discern the subtle gradations in color, that only needed change of occupation to make him a painter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It really matters very little to any of us what the handwriting of an author may be, and so it should matter very little how an artist touches the canvas.
It is true that a picture containing and expressing an idea the most elevated can be painted either in mass or detail, at the pleasure of the painter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In absolute contrast to this, there lived a man at Barbizon who maintained that a spade was not a spade at all, but merely a mass of shadow against a low twilight sky, in the hands of a figure who with uncovered head listens reverently; that the spade is merely a symbol of labor ”

“ In the second Sorolla presents but a series of shorthand notes which you yourself can fill in to suit your taste and experience both of life and nature.
Whether you prefer one or the other, or neither, is a matter for you to decide. You pay your money or you don't, and you can take your choice. The future only can tell the story of the revolution of the wheel. In the next decade a single Meissonier may be worth its weight in sheet gold and layers of Sorollas may be stored in attics awaiting some fortunate auction. ”

“ Ruskin or the example of the men he places on so high a pinnacle—I am now referring entirely to their technic—is due to my having painted all my life out-of-doors, the best place in which a man can study nature at close range. This experience has taught me that weight and solidity are as important in the rendering of a natural object as air and perspective, and that the staining of paper with washes of transparent color does not and cannot give them. ”

“ Nor can any brilliant light, a crisp, snapping [106] light—a glint of the sun's rays, for instance, on the break of the surf, or on the round of a glossy leaf, reflecting like a mirror the opaque sky—ever be achieved by careful working around the edges of an unwashed speck of paper—the transparent man's only means of expressing a high light. ”