the strongest light, and whatever comes against it, church
tower, rock, palace, or ship under full sail, is the darkest object.
In addition to this there is always some one point where the outdoor
painter can find a lesser supplementary light and near it a lesser
supplementary dark. Moreover, throughout the rest of the composition
these same lights and darks are echoed and re-echoed in constantly
decreasing gradations.

You may apply these same tests everywhere in nature. Even in a gray
day, when the sun is not so positive a factor in distributing light,
and the shadows are so subtle that it is difficult to discover them,
there is always some mass of foliage, the silver sheen from an old
shingled roof, the glare of a white wall, which marks for the
composition its lightest light, while a corresponding dark can always
be found somewhere in the tree-trunks, under the overhanging eaves, or
in the broken crevices of the masonry.

So it is with every other expression of nature. Even on a Venetian
lagoon, where the sky and water are apparently one (not really one to
the quick eye of an expert, the water always being one tone lower than
the sky--that is, more gray than the overbending sky)--even in this
lagoon you will find some one portion of the surface lighter than any
other portion; and in expressing it your eye first and your brush next
must catch in the opalescent sweep of delicious color under your eye
its exact quantity of black and white. By black and white I mean, of
course, that excess or absence of pure color which when translated
into pure black and white would express the meaning of the
subject-matter, as one of Raphael Morghen's engravings on steel gives
you the feeling and color in his masterly rendering of Da Vinci's
"Last Supper."

In my judgment one of the great landscapes of modern times is the
picture by the distinguished Dutch painter, Mauve, known as "Changing
Pasture," which is now owned by Mr. Charles P. Taft, of Cincinnati.
Here the factor of mass is carried to its utmost limit. Sky one mass;
flock of sheep another mass; and the foreground, sweeping under the
sheep and beyond until it is lost in the haze of the distance, another
mass, or, if one chooses to put it that way, another broad gradation
of a section of the picture: the highest light being some
infinitesimal speck in the diaphanous silver sky, the strongest dark
being found somewhere in the foreground or in the flock of sheep.

By a str