The Painter in oil

judgment of pictures, as well as in the growth and permanency of his own fame. That is
why a great popular reputation dies so rapidly in many instances. The æsthetic qualities
of the man’s work are the only ones which can insure a permanent reputation for that
work; for the art of painting is fundamentally æsthetic, and nothing external to that can
give it an artistic value. Without that its popularity and fame are only matters of
accidental coincidence with popular taste.
If a painter is really great in the power of conception and of expression of any of the
great æsthetic elements, his work will be permanently great. It will be acknowledged to
be so by the consensus of the world’s opinion in the long run; nothing else can make it
so, and nothing but obliteration can prevent it. I am explicit in stating these ideas, not
because I expect that you will learn from this book to be a great master of the æsthetic,
but because I am assured that you can never be a painter unless you understand a
painter’s true problems. You must be able to know a good picture in order to make a
good picture, and however little you try for, your work will be the better for having a
painter’s way of looking at a painter’s work. The technical problems are the control of
the materials of expression. The painter must have that control. The student’s business is
to attain that control, and then, he has the means to convey his ideas. But those ideas, if
he be a true painter, are not ideas of history or of fiction, but ideas of line and mass and,
color, and of their combinations.
The Color Sense. - Therefore color is a thing to be striven for for its own sake. Good
color is a value in itself. You may not have the genius to be a good colorist, but you need
not be a bad one; for the color sense can be definitely acquired. I will not say that color
initiative can always be acquired; but the power to perceive and to judge; good color can
be, and it will go far towards the making of a good painter, even of a great one.
I knew one painter who came near to greatness, and near to greatness as a colorist,
who in twelve years trained his eye and feeling from a very inferior perception of color to
the power which, as I say, came near to greatness. He was an able painter and a well-
trained one before that; but in this direction he was deficient, and he deliberately set
about it to educate that side of himself, with the result I have stated.
How did he do it? Simply by recognizing where he needed training, and working
constantly from nature to perceive fine distinctions of tone; and by careful and severe
self-criticism. Summer after summer he went outdoors and worked with colors and
canvas to study out certain problems. Every year he set himself mainly one problem to
solve. This year it might be luminosity; next it might be the domination of a certain
color; another year the just discrimination of tones -and he became a most exquisite
colorist.
So, as I knew his work before and after this self-training, and as I know personally of
the means he took to attain his purpose, I think I can speak positively of the fact that
such development of the color sense is possible.
Taste. - It is well to remember that taste in color is not dependent on personal
judgment alone; that what is good and what is bad in color does not rest on mere
opinion. That a good colorist’s idea of color does not agree with your own is not a matter
of mere whim or liking, in which you have quite as good a right to your opinion as he has
to his. The colorist, it is true, does not produce or judge of color by rule. He works from
his feeling of what is right. But there is a law back of his taste and feeling. The laws of