CHAPTER XXXI: LANDSCAPE
FROM the usual rating of figures as the most important branch of
painting, it would be natural to speak of that kind of work first. But
work from the head must come before you attempt the figure, and there
are a good many things that you can learn from landscape which will
help you in figure-work. The manner of painting figures has been much
modified, too, of late years, owing to certain qualities and points of view
which are due to the study of landscape and the important position that
it has come to occupy.
In the old days landscape was only a secondary thing, not only as a branch of art in itself,
but particularly as it was used by figure painters. In this century it has so broadened in
its scope that it is now recognized to be as important a field of work as any. But further
than this, it has become the most influential study in the whole range of painting. From
the development of the study of outdoor nature, and particularly outdoor light, it has
come about that certain facts of nature have been recognized which were before
neglected, ignored, or unsuspected, and these facts bear quite as much on the painting of
the figure as on the painting of landscape. So that it is no more possible to paint the
figure, in some respects, as it was painted as a matter of course a hundred years ago,
while other ways of painting the figure, which were undreamed of at that time, are the
matters of course now.
The whole problem of light has taken a new phase, and the treatment of color in that
relation is modified in the painting of figures as well as in the other branches of work.
Pitch. - In no direction is this more marked than in the matter of pitch, or key. With
the study of landscape, the range of gradation from light to dark has broadened. A
picture may now be painted in a “high key;” the picture may be, from the highest to the
lowest note in it, far lighter than would have been thought possible even thirty years ago.
This question of “bright pictures” is one which demands consideration. One has only
to go into any exhibition of pictures to-day to be struck with the fact that the key of
almost every picture in it, of whatever kind, has changed from what it would have been
in the last generation. This is not merely the result of the spread of the “Impressionist”
idea. That influence has only been strongly felt in this country within the last ten years.
It is not that which I am speaking of now I mean the fact that even the grayer pictures -
those which do not in any ordinary sense of the word belong to Impressionist work - are
light in color, where they would once have been dark, or at least darker, The
impressionists have had a definite influence, it is true; but the work of the earlier “plein
air” men - the men who posed their models out-of-doors as a matter of principle, who
studied landscape out-of-doors - was the first and most powerful influence, and that of
the impressionists, coming along after it, has simply emphasized and carried it farther.