Viewing page 156 of 207

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

supplies, in the absence of reality, the changes, ommissions or additions which create the pictorial. The Japanese way of drawing from memory is superior. Hamerton is right in defining even all painting from nature as more or less a carving of memories into the very seen reality; at least of symbols agreed on by convenience to represent actual phenomena, such as outlines, pigments, e.t.c. [[underlined]] We must see in a new way. [[/underlined]] Namely: It is [[underlined]] not at [[/underlined]] all the [[underlined]] accurate reality [[/underlined]] which makes an impression upon our feelings, and in portrait and landscape (different in still life, in looking at vases, flowers, horses), but first certain principal features, such as a brilliant blue sky; or the proportion and red color of a house in a scene; or the contrast of yellow and blue of a meadow creek, etc, next the corresponding pictorial unity and harmony of the scene containing such principal feature of attraction, which inspire in the eye the activity of the mind to produce a painting. This [[underlined]] principal motiv [[/underlined]] (the single feature) [[underlined]] plus the total impression [[/underlined]] is the pictorial of reality, mixed up with all the nonessential real facts which [[double underlined]] we do not at all observe [[/double underlined]], while receiving the pictorial impression, which we ascertain only when we come to draw or paint the phenomena from nature. Now we cannot do without the second, sober contemplation and accurate measuring and imitating of the real but nonessential facts, as shadows, lines, perspective, detail. But we must learn to see these different from what they are. That, what they actually are, has been, since Leonardo, up to Monet, the task of

(121