estions, your ideas, for
pictures from nature. Keep your eyes open. Observe all poses which may
hint of possible schemes of light and shade, of composition, or of
color. It is marvellous how constantly groupings and poses and effects
of all kinds occur in every-day life. Humanity is kaleidoscopic in its
succession of changes; one after another giving a phase new and
different, but equally suggestive of a picture if you will take the
hint. The picture which originates in a natural occurrence is always
true if it is sincerely and frankly painted. Truth is more various
than fiction. It is easier to see than to invent. And in the
arrangement of the material which nature freely and constantly
furnishes to him there is scope for all the invention of man.

=Action and Character.=--The picture comes from the action--resides in
it. The action comes from the act, and is natural to it, expressive of
it. Any gesture or position which is the natural and unaffected result
of an essential action will be true and vital, suggestive of nature,
and beautiful because it will inevitably have character--be
characteristic. The beauty of the picture is not something external to
the costumes, occupations, and life which surround you, but is to be
found, contained in it, and brought out, manifested, made visible, by
the mere logical working out of the need, the custom, or the occasion.

Emphasis is only the salience of the most natural movement.

Daily life swarms with pictures. You do not need to go to other places
and other times for subjects. If you are awake to what is going on
around you, if you see the essential line of the occupation, or the
mass and color which is incidental to every least activity, you will
have more suggested to you than you have time to do justice to. And it
is your business to see the beautiful in the commonplace. Everything
is commonplace till you see the charm in it. The artistic possibility
does not lie in the unusual in any subject, but in the fact that the
thing cannot get done without action and grouping and color and
contrast; and these are the artist's opportunities. Keep your eyes
open for them; learn to recognize them when you see them; look for
these rather than for the details of the accidental fact which brings
them out. See the movement of it, and the relation of it to what
surrounds it, and you will hardly avoid seeing the picture in it.

Here is a composition which is an almost literal rendering of