Still Life. - For practical study of composition, the most useful materials you can
have are to be found in still life. Nowhere can you have so great freedom of arrangement
in the concrete. You can take as many actual objects as you please, and place them
freedom of arrangement in the concrete. You can take as many actual objects as you
please, and place them in all sorts of relations to each other, studying their effect as to
grouping; and so study most tangibly the principles as well as the practice of bringing
together line and mass and color as elements, through the means of actual objects. This
you should constantly do, till composition is no more an abstract thing, but a practical
study in which you may work out freely and visibly intellectual æsthetic ideas almost
unconsciously, and train your eye to see instinctively the possibilities of all sorts of
compositions, and to correct the falsities of accidental combinations.
Don’t Attempt too much. - Don’t be too ambitious. Begin with simple
arrangements, and add to them, studying the structure of each new combination and
grouping. When you are going to paint, remember that too much of an undertaking will
not give you any more beauty in the picture, and may lead to discouragement.
In the Chapter on “Still Life” I will explain more practically the means you may take,
and how you may take them, to the end of making composition a practical study to you.
The Sower, by Millet