gathers his notes and forms his chords until he brings forth from
chaos glorious harmony. To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken,
as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano. That
Nature is always right is an assertion artistically, as untrue as it is
one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely
right to such an extent, even, that it might almost be said that Nature is
usually wrong; that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring
about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common
at all."

Between the life class, with its model standing in academic pose and the
pictured scene in which the model becomes a factor in the expression of an
idea, there is a great gulf fixed. The precept of the ateliers is paint
the figure; if you can do that, you can paint anything.

Influenced by this half truth many a student, with years of patient life
school training behind him, has sought to enter the picture-making stage
with a single step. He then discovers that what he had learned to do
cleverly by means of routine practice, was in reality the easiest thing to
do in the manufacture of a picture, and that sterner difficulties awaited
him in his settlement of the figure into its surroundings--background and
foreground.(1)

Many portrait painters assert that it is the setting of the subject which
gives them the most trouble. The portraitist deals with but a single
figure, yet this, in combination with its scanty support, provokes this
well-known comment.

The lay community cannot understand this. It seems illogical. It can only
be comprehended by him who paints.

The figure is tangible and represents the known. The background is a
space opened into the unknown, a place for the expressions of fancy. It
is the tone quality accompanying the song, the subject's reliance for
balance and contrast. An inquiry into the statement that the accessories
of the subject demand a higher degree of artistic skill than the painting
of the subject itself, and that on these accessories depend the carrying
power of the subject, leads directly to the principles of composition.

"It must of necessity be," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "that even works of
genius, like every other effect, as they must have their cause, must also
have their rules; it cannot be by chance that excellencies are produced
with any constancy or any certainty, for this is not the nature of