o begin and where to leave off. Practice in
still life will help you somewhat, but still things in nature are
seldom arranged with that centralization which makes a subject easy to
see. Even the simplicity which is sometimes obvious is, when you come
to paint it, only the more difficult to handle because of its
simplicity. The simplicity which you should look for to make your
selection of a subject easy is not the lack of something to draw, but
the definiteness of some marked object or effect. What is good as a
"view" is apt to be the reverse of suitable for a picture. You want
something tangible, and you do not want too much or too little of it.
A long line of hill with a broad field beneath it, for instance, is
simple enough, but what is there for you to take hold of? In an
ordinary light it is only a few broad planes of value and color
without an accent object to emphasize or centre on. It can be painted,
of course, and can be made a beautiful picture, but it is a subject
for a master, not for a student. But suppose there were a tree or a
group of trees in the field; suppose a mass of cloud obscured the sky,
and a ray of sunlight fell on and around the tree through a rift in
the clouds. Or suppose the opposite of this. Suppose all was in broad
light, and the tree was strongly lighted on one side, on the other
shadowed, and that it threw a mass of shadow below and to one side of
it. Immediately there is something which you can take hold of and make
your picture around. The field and hill alone will make a study of
distance and middle distance and foreground, but it would not make an
effective sketch. The two effects I have supposed give the possibility
for a sketch at once, and what suggests a sketch suggests a picture.

This central object or effect which I have supposed also clears up the
matter of the placing of your subject on the canvas. With merely the
hill and plain you might cut it off anywhere, a mile or two one side
or the other would make little or no difference to your picture. But
the tree and the effect of light decide the thing for you. The tree
and the lighting are the central idea of the picture. Very well, then,
make them large enough on your canvas to be of that importance. Then
what is around them is only so much more as the canvas will hold, and
you will place the tree where, having the proper proportionate size,
it will also "compose well" and make the canvas balance, being neither
in the middle