A Help.—You will find it very useful as a help in seeing pitch as well as color to have a card with a square hole cut in it to look through at your landscape. Have one side covered with black velvet and the other left white. Compare darks with the black, and the lights with the white, and make the picture compose in the opening as in a frame.
Key and Harmony.—But you should remember that the high key for out-of-door work does not mean crude nor unsympathetic color, neither does it mean that there is nothing but sunshine and shadow. Your picture may be as high as you please in pitch, and yet be harmonious and pleasing. I have seen impressionist pictures of most pronounced type hung in the same room with old pictures and in perfect harmony with them. It means that good color is always good color, and will always be harmonious with other good color, whatever the pitch of either. One picture is simply a different note from the other, that is all. The color in nature is not crude in not being dark. The relations of spots of color are just; you have only to be as just in observing them, and your picture will be harmonious.
Make your notes just all over your canvas. Have some of them just and the rest false, and of course it will be wrong. Or if you try to make crudity take the place of brilliancy, you will not get harmony. The harmony which comes from the presence in just relation of all the colors is none the less beautiful because more alive. You need not try for the most contrasting and most sparkling qualities of out-of-door color, but you should feel for the out-of-doorness of it.
The space, the breadth, lack of confines, the largeness and movement, vibration and life,—these are the things which the modern painter has discovered in landscape and has emphasized; and this is what has made modern landscape a vital force in modern art. Whatever you do or do not see, feel, and express in your painting, these you must see, feel, and express; for once these qualities are recognized and accepted they are as universal as the law of gravity, and can be as little ignored.
Landscape Drawing.—Landscape is more difficult to draw than is generally thought; not only is the character affected by the scale of the main masses, but there is great probability of overdrawing. The curves that mark the modelling of the ground are very difficult to give justly. The altitude and slope of mountains are almost invariably exaggerated. The twists and windings of roadways and fences are seldom carefully drawn; yet the most exquisite movement of line is to be gained by just representation of them. To give the character of a tree, too, without making out too much of the detail of it, needs more precise observation than it generally gets.
Willow Road. D. Burleigh Parkhurst.
Get the character; get the sentiment of it. Search for the important things here first, and be more particular about the placing of each line than about the number of lines.
Don't draw too many lines in a landscape; don't draw too many objects. Carefully study the scene before you till you have decided what parts are most essential in giving the character that you want to express, and then draw most carefully those parts. See which are the most expressive lines in it. Get the swing and movement of those lines in the large; then study the more subtle movement of them. Get these things on the canvas first, and put everything else in as subsidiary to them. Have all this well placed before you begin to paint, and allow for little things being painted on to this.