b on to his platform and sit in his chair and
turn over his books, though I don't believe they'd be interesting to
read, but they'd certainly be pretty to look at. If you and I were
there, though, we should soon be out away behind, looking round the
corner, and finding all sorts of odd places that unfortunately can't
all get into the picture, only we know they're there, down yonder
corridor, and from what the painter shows us we can invent the rest
for ourselves.

One of the troubles of a painter is that he can't paint every detail
of things as they are in nature. A primrose, when you first see it,
is just a little yellow spot. When you hold it in your hand you find
it made up of petals round a tiny centre with little things in it.
If you take a magnifying glass you can see all its details multiplied.
If you put a tiny bit of it under a microscope, ten thousand more little
details come out, and so it might go on as long as you went on magnifying.
Now a picture can't be like that. It just has to show you the general
look of things as you see them from an ordinary distance. But there
comes in another kind of trouble. How do you see things? We don't all
see the same things in the same way. Your mother's face looks very
different to you from its look to a mere person passing in the street.
Your own room has a totally different aspect to you from what it bears
to a casual visitor. The things you specially love have a way of
standing out and seeming prominent to you, but not, of course, to any
one else. Then there are other differences in the look of the same
things to different people which you have perhaps noticed. Some people
are more sensitive to colours than others. Some are much more sensitive
to brightness and shadow. Some will notice one kind of object in a
view, or some detail in a face far more emphatically than others. Girls
are quicker to take note of the colour of eyes, hair, skin, clothes,
and so forth than boys. A woman who merely sees another woman for a
moment will be able to describe her and her dress far more accurately
than a man. A man will be noticing other things. His picture, if he
painted one, would make those other things prominent.

So it is with everything that we see. None of us sees more than certain
features in what the eye rests upon, and if we are artists it is only
those features that we should paint. We can't possibly paint every
detail of everything that comes into the picture. We must mak