Outdoor Sketching / Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

It is true that a picture containing and expressing an idea the most elevated can be painted either in mass or detail, at the pleasure of the painter. He may write in the Munich style, or after the manner of the Düsseldorf ready writers, or the modern French pothook and hanger, or the antiquated Dutch. He can use the English of Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Josh Billings, at his own good pleasure. If he conveys an intelligible idea he has accomplished a result the value of which is just in proportion to the quality of that idea.

To continue this parallel, it may be said that extreme realism is the use of too many words in a sentence and too many sentences in a paragraph; extreme impressionism, the use of too few. Neither, however, is fundamental, and art can be good, bad, or indifferent containing each or combining both.

Realism, or, to express it more clearly, detailism, is the realizing of the whole subject-matter or motive of a picture in exact detail. Impressionism is the generalizing of the subject-matter as a whole and the expression of only its salient features.

The extreme realist or detailist of the Ruskin type has for years been insisting that a spade was a spade and should be painted to look like a spade; that a spade was not a spade until every nail in the handle and every crack in the blade became apparent.

The more advanced would have insisted on not only the fibre in the wood, but the brand on the other side of the blade, had it been physically possible to show it.

In absolute contrast to this, there lived a man at Barbizon who maintained that a spade was not a spade at all, but merely a mass of shadow against a low twilight sky, in the hands of a figure who with uncovered head listens reverently; that the spade is merely a symbol of labor; that he used it as he would use a word necessary to express a sentence, which would be unintelligible without it, and that it was perfectly immaterial to him, and should be to the world, whether it was a spade or a shovel so long as the soft twilight, and the reverent figures wearied with the day's work, and the flat waste of field stretching away to the little village spire on the dim horizon line told the story of human suffering and patience and toil, as with folded hands they listened to the soft cadence of the angelus.

Which of these two methods of expression is correct—Ruskin or Millet? Are there any laws which govern, or is it a matter of taste, fancy, or feeling? Is it a matter of individuality? If so, which individual by his methods tells us the most truths? Let us endeavor to analyze.

I whirl through a mountain gorge and catch a glance through a car-window—an impression. In the darkness of the tunnel it remains with me. I see the great mass of white cumuli and against them the dark cedars, the straggling foot-path and steep cliffs. I am impressed with the sweep of the cloud form pressing over and around them. With my eyes closed I paint this on my brain, and if I am great enough and wide enough and deep enough I can subdue my personality and forget my surroundings, and when opportunity offers I can express upon my canvas the few salient facts which impressed me and should impress my fellow men. If it is the silvery light of the morning, I am Corot; if the day is gone and across the cool lagoon I see the ripple amid the tall grass catching the fading color of the warm sky, I am Daubigny; if a gray mist hangs over the hillside and the patches of snow half melted express the warmth and mellowness of the coming spring, I am our own Inness.

Perhaps, however, I am not content. I am overburdened with curiosity. I say to myself: "What sort of trees, pine or cedar?" I think, pine, but I am uneasy lest they should be hemlock. Were the rocks all perpendicular, or did not detached bowlders line the path? About the clouds, were they not some small cirri beneath the zenith? My memory is so bad—and so I stop the train and go back. Just as I expected. The trees were spruce and the rocks were grass-grown and full of fissures, and so I begin to paint and continue. I get the bark on the trees, and the foliage until each particular leaf stands on end, and the strata of the cliffs, and the very sand on the path. I crowd into my canvas geology, botany, and the laws governing cloud forms.

Being an ordinary mortal, my curiosity, my telescopic eyes, my magnifying-glass of vision, my love of truth, my positive conviction that it is a spruce and should not be painted as a pine, except through rank perjury, all these forces together have undermined my impression or, like thorns, have grown up and choked it. Being honest, I am ready to confess that before returning to the spot I was in doubt about the pine. But I am still ready to affirm that what I have labored over is the exact counterfeit and presentment of nature, and equally willing to denounce the public for not seeing it as I do. I forget that I have been a boor and a vulgarian—that I have been invited to a feast and that I have pried into mysteries which my goddess would veil from my sight; that I have had the impertinence to bring my own personal advice into the discussion; that I have insisted that fissures, and leaves, and sand, and infinite detail were necessary to this expression of nature's sublimity.