The Book of Art for Young People | Page 3

right colour, where all
the people are nicely dressed to match one another, and are not standing
in one another's way, and not interrupting one another or forgetting to
help play the game. That's the difference between pictures and
photographs. A photograph is almost always wrong somewhere.
Something is out of place, or something is there which ought to be
away, or the light is wrong; or, if it's coloured, the colours are just not
in keeping with one another. If it's a landscape the trees are where we
don't want them; they hide what we want to see, or they don't hide the
very thing we want hidden. Then the clouds are in the wrong place, and
a wind ruffles the water just where we want to see something reflected.
That's the way things actually happen in the real world. But in the
world of 'Let's pretend,' in the world of art, they don't happen so. There
everything happens right, and everybody does, not so much what they

should (that might sometimes be dull), but exactly what we want them
to do--which is so very much better. That is the world of your art and
my art. Unfortunately all the pictures in the galleries weren't painted
just for you and me; but you'll find, if you look for them, plenty that
were, and the rest don't matter. Those were painted, no doubt, for some
one else. But if you could find the some one else for whom they were
painted, the some one else whose world of 'Let's pretend' was just these
pictures that don't belong to your world, and if they could tell you about
their world of 'Let's pretend,' ten to one you'd find it just as good a
world as your own, and you'd soon learn to 'pretend' that way too.
Well, the purpose of this book is to take you into a number of worlds of
'Let's pretend,' most of which I daresay will be new to you, and perhaps
you will find some of them quite delightful places. I'm sure you can't
help liking St. Jerome's Cell when you come to it. It's not a bit like any
room we can find anywhere in the world to-day, but wouldn't it be
joyful if we could? What a good time we could have there with the
tame lion (not a bit like any lion in the Zoo, but none the worse for that)
and the jolly bird, and all St. Jerome's little things. I should like to
climb on to his platform and sit in his chair and turn over his books,
though I don't believe they'd be interesting to read, but they'd certainly
be pretty to look at. If you and I were there, though, we should soon be
out away behind, looking round the corner, and finding all sorts of odd
places that unfortunately can't all get into the picture, only we know
they're there, down yonder corridor, and from what the painter shows
us we can invent the rest for ourselves.
One of the troubles of a painter is that he can't paint every detail of
things as they are in nature. A primrose, when you first see it, is just a
little yellow spot. When you hold it in your hand you find it made up of
petals round a tiny centre with little things in it. If you take a
magnifying glass you can see all its details multiplied. If you put a tiny
bit of it under a microscope, ten thousand more little details come out,
and so it might go on as long as you went on magnifying. Now a
picture can't be like that. It just has to show you the general look of
things as you see them from an ordinary distance. But there comes in
another kind of trouble. How do you see things? We don't all see the

same things in the same way. Your mother's face looks very different to
you from its look to a mere person passing in the street. Your own
room has a totally different aspect to you from what it bears to a casual
visitor. The things you specially love have a way of standing out and
seeming prominent to you, but not, of course, to any one else. Then
there are other differences in the look of the same things to different
people which you have perhaps noticed. Some people are more
sensitive to colours than others. Some are much more sensitive to
brightness and shadow. Some will notice one kind of object in a view,
or some detail in a face far more emphatically than others. Girls are
quicker to take note of the colour of eyes, hair, skin, clothes, and so
forth than boys. A woman who