false relation of color existing between the green wheat, the horses
trampling through it and the sky above it. The unity of these elements
was the first step in finish and the artist with all his vast knowledge of
little things never knew it.

If then, perfect finish is a matter beyond detail, it follows it must be
looked for elsewhere than at this end of nature.

The average man soon takes the artist's intention and accepts the work on
this basis, thinking not of finish nor of its lack, but of nature;
acknowledging through the suggestions of the picture that he has been
touched by her.

"During these moments," says John La Farge in his "Considerations on
Painting," "are not the spectators excusable who live for the moment a
serene existence, feeling as if they had made the work they admire?"

The argument then is that the master painter is one who selects the
subject, takes precious care that its foundation quantities and qualities
are furnished and then hands it over to any one _to finish._ That it
falls into sympathetic hands is his single solicitude.

"It requires two men to paint a picture," says Mr. Hopkinson Smith, "one
to work the brush and the other to kill the artist when he has finished
his picture and doesn't know it."

PART III - THE CRITICAL JUDGEMENT OF PICTURES

"With the critic all depends on the right application of his
principles in particular cases. And since there are fifty
ingenuous critics to one of penetration, it would be a wonder if
the applications were in every case with the caution indispensable
to an exact adjustment of the scales of art."--_Lessing's Laocoeon._

CHAPTER XIII - THE MAN IN ART

"Art is a middle quality between a thought and a thing--the union of that
which is nature with that which is exclusively human."(16)

For the every-day critic much of the secret lies in the proposition art is
nature, with the man added; nature seen through a temperament. Nature is
apparent on the surface of pictures. We see this side at a glance. To
find the man in it requires deeper sight.

If a painter of portraits, has he painted the surface, or the character?
Has he gone halting after it, or has he nailed it: has he won with it
finally? Is he a man whose natural refinement proved a true mirror in
which his sitter was reflected or has the coarse and uneven grain of the
artist become manifest in the false planes of the character presenta