d "at
least a two years' study" of these problems was thought necessary before
practical work in art could commence. (See Appendix.)

Mr. Ruskin's fling at the perspective labyrinth would have been more
authoritative than it proved, had he not too often lessened our faith by
the cry of wolf when it proved a false alarm.

There is a single truth which, though simple, was never known to Oriental
art, namely; that in every picture there must be a real or understood
horizon--the level of the painter's eye,--that all lines above this will
descend and all lines below will rise to it as they recede.

But upon aerial perspective depends the question of detail in the receding
object and this to the painter is of first importance. To temper a local
color so that it shall settle itself to a nicety at any distance, in the
perspective scheme, and to express the exact degree of shadow which a
given color shall have under a given light and at a given distance are
problems which absorb four-fifths of the painter's attention.

If the features of a man a hundred yards away be painted with the same
fidelity as though he stood but ten yards distant the aerial balance is
disturbed, the man being brought nearer than his place on the perspective
plan allows.

At a mile's range a tree to the painter is not an object expressing a
combination of leaves and branches, but a solid colored mass having its
light and shade and perhaps perforated by the sky. It is with natural
_aspect_ and not natural _fact_ that the painter deals.

Pre-Raphaelite art practised this phase of honesty, which, in our own day
was revived in England. In this later coterie of pre-Raphaelite brethren
was but one painter, the others, men of varying artistic perceptions and
impulses. To the painter it in time became evident that he was out of
place in this company and the commentary of his withdrawal proved more
forcible than any to be made by an outsider.

When, therefore, judgment be applied to a work of painting it must be with
a knowledge of natural aspect in mind, not necessarily related, even
vaguely, to the scene under consideration, but such as has come _by_ the
absorption of nature's moods, whereby, with the cause given, the effect
may be known as a familiar sequence. The public too should be
sufficiently knowing to catch the code signals of each artist whereby
these natural facts are symbolled.

Herein has now been set forth, as concisely as possi