The Book of Art for Young People | Page 4

merely sees another woman for a
moment will be able to describe her and her dress far more accurately
than a man. A man will be noticing other things. His picture, if he
painted one, would make those other things prominent.
So it is with everything that we see. None of us sees more than certain
features in what the eye rests upon, and if we are artists it is only those
features that we should paint. We can't possibly paint every detail of
everything that comes into the picture. We must make a choice, and of
course we choose the features and details that please us best. Now, the
purpose of painting anything at all is to paint the beauty of the thing. If
you see something that strikes you as ugly, you don't instinctively want
to paint it; but when you see an effect of beauty, you feel that it would
be very nice indeed to have a picture showing that beauty. So a picture
is not really the representation of a thing, but the representation of the
beauty of the thing.
Some people can see beauty almost everywhere; they are conscious of
beauty all day long. They want to surround themselves with beauty, to
make all their acts beautiful, to shed beauty all about them. Those are
the really artistic souls. The gift of such perfect instinct for beauty
comes by nature to a few. It can be cultivated by almost all. That
cultivation of all sorts of beauty in life is what many people call
civilization--the real art of living. To see beauty everywhere in nature is
not so very difficult. It is all about us where the work of uncivilized
man has not come in to destroy it. Artists are people who by nature and

by education have acquired the power to see beauty in what they look
at, and then to set it down on paper or canvas, or in some other material,
so that other people can see it too.
It seems strange that at one time the beauty of natural landscape was
hardly perceived by any one at all. People lived in the beautiful country
and scarcely knew that it was beautiful. Then came the time when the
beauty of landscape began to be felt by the nicest people. They began
to put it into their poetry, and to talk and write about it, and to display it
in landscape pictures. It was through poems and pictures, which they
read and saw, that the general run of folks first learned to look for
beauty in nature. I have no doubt that Turner's wonderful sunsets made
plenty of people look at sunsets and rejoice in the intricacy and
splendour of their glory for the first time in their lives. Well, what
Turner and other painters of his generation did for landscape, had had
to be done for men and women in earlier days by earlier generations of
artists. The Greeks were the first, in their sculpture, to show the
wonderful beauty of the human form; till their day people had not
recognised what to us now seems obvious. No doubt they had thought
one person pretty and another handsome, but they had not known that
the human figure was essentially a glorious thing till the Greek
sculptors showed them. Another thing painters have taught the world is
the beauty of atmosphere. Formerly no one seems to have noticed how
atmosphere affects every object that is seen through it. The painters had
to show us that it is so. After we had seen the effect of atmosphere in
pictures we began to be able to see for ourselves in nature, and thus a
whole group of new pleasures in views of nature was opened up to us.
Away back in the Middle Ages, six hundred and more years ago, folks
had far less educated eyes than we possess to-day. They looked at
nature more simply than we do and saw less in it. So they were
satisfied with pictures that omitted a great many features we cannot do
without.
But painting does not only concern itself with representing the world
we actually see and the people that our eyes actually behold. It
concerns itself quite as much with the world of fancy, of make-believe.

Indeed, most painters when they look at an actual scene let their fancy
play about it, so that presently what they see and what they fancy get
mixed up together, and their pictures are a mixture of fancy and of fact,
and no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins. The
fancies of people are very different at different times, and you can't
understand the pictures of old days unless you can share the fancies of
the old