nce. That the picture is
beautiful in color is what moves him. As composition and color the
thing is an admirable piece of aesthetic thinking and aesthetic
expression, and so gives him a purely aesthetic delight; and the
technical process is secondary with him, interesting only because he
is a technician. The representation of the objects incidental to the
subject is as incidental to his interest, as it is to the picture
considered as an aesthetic thought.

This is what the layman finds it so impossible to take into his mental
consciousness. And it is probable that many painters do not so
distinguish their artistic point of view from their human point of
view. But consciously or unconsciously the painter does think in these
terms of color, line, and mass when he is working out his picture; and
whether he admits it to himself or not, these characteristics are the
great influencing facts in his 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 aesthetic 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
aesthetic, 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic, 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, a