ou will always have the particular feeling associated with rows of
vertical lines in the abstract. And further, whenever you get the
swinging lines of the volute, an impression of energy will be conveyed,
no matter whether it be a breaking wave, rolling clouds, whirling dust,
or only a mass of tangled hoop iron in a wheelwright's yard. As was said
above, these effects may be greatly increased, modified, or even
destroyed by associations connected with the things represented. If in
painting the timber yard the artist is thinking more about making it
look like a stack of real wood with its commercial associations and
less about using the artistic material its appearance presents for the
making of a picture, he may miss the harmonic impression the long lines
of the stacks of wood present. If real wood is the first thing you are
led to think of in looking at his work, he will obviously have missed
the expression of any artistic feeling the subject was capable of
producing. And the same may be said of the scaffold poles or the hoop
iron in the wheelwright's yard.

This structure of abstract lines at the basis of a picture will be more
or less overlaid with the truths of nature, and all the rich variety of
natural forms, according to the requirements of the subject. Thus, in
large decorative work, where the painting has to take its place as part
of an architectural scheme, the severity of this skeleton will be
necessary to unite the work to the architectural forms around it, of
which it has to form a part; and very little indulgence in the
realisation of natural truth should be permitted to obscure it. But in
the painting of a small cabinet picture that exists for close
inspection, the supporting power of this line basis is not nearly so
essential, and a full indulgence in all the rich variety of natural
detail is permissible. And this is how it happens that painters who have
gloried in rich details have always painted small pictures, and painters
who have preferred larger truths pictures of bigger dimensions. It
sounds rather paradoxical to say the smaller the picture the more detail
it should contain, and the larger the less, but it is nevertheless true.
For although a large picture has not of necessity got to be part of an
architectural scheme, it has to be looked at from a distance at which
small detail could not be seen, and where such detail would greatly
weaken its expressive power. And further, the small picture easily