characteristic head of the novelist set on shoulders
characteristically bent forward and the body characteristically tall.
What more can be told of Thackeray's personality? Would the buttons and
the wrinkles of the clothing help matters! No, as facts they would not,
and when art has to do only with character, the simplest statement is the
most forcible.

Millet, at one time, was known as "the man who painted peasants without
wrinkles in their breeches." Not because wrinkles were too much for him,
nor because they were not thought worth while, but because, in his effort
to prune his picture of the unessentials, the wrinkles were brushed aside.

When, however, art has to do with filling an entire space with something,
and the clothing occupies a considerable part of it, what shall be done?
This changes the details of the question. Yet all portraits that hit hard
in exhibitions are those conceived in simplicity, those in which the
personality is what stops and holds us.

There are certain large organic lines of drapery which the character
demands, but beyond this point opinion divides authoritatively from the
complete silence of obliteration to the tumultuous noisiness of "the whole
truth"

In the portraits by Carriere all detail is swept away, and the millinery
artists are shocked. Simplicity should never compromise texture and
quality. This side of the truth cannot prove objectionable.

"You have made my broadcloth look like two-fifty a yard and it really cost
four," was a criticism offered by a young lady who posed in a riding
habit. Such practical criticism is frequently necessary to bring the
artist down from the top height observatory where he is absorbed with "the
big things."

Breath does not signify neglect of detail or neglect of finish; it means
simplification where unity had been threatened. It is seeing the big side
of small things, if the small things cannot be ignored.

The lighting of a subject has much to do with its breadth. A light may be
selected that will chop such a well organized unit as the body into three
or four separate sections, or one that produces an _equal_ division of
light and shade--seldom good. Shadows are generally the hiding-places for
mystery; and mystery is ever charming. None better than Rembrandt knew
the value of those vague spaces of nothingness, in backgrounds, and in the
figure itself, a sudden pitch from light and positiveness into conjecture.
We hear in pho