In such a landscape perspective of value and color is easily observed, making positive the separation of objects. The painter, under these conditions, is independent of linear perspective to give depth to his work, which being one of the cheap devices of painting he avoids as much as possible.
It is because aerial perspective is paintable and the other sort is not that artists shun the clear altitudes of Colorado where all the year one can see for eighty miles and, on the Atlantic border, wait the summer through for the fuller atmosphere which the fall will bring, that by its tender envelopment the vividness and detail which is characteristic of the American landscape may give place to what is serviceable to the purposes of painting.
It is because of misunderstanding on this point that we of the Western Hemisphere may wrongly challenge foreign landscape, judging it upon the natural aspect of our own country. The [pg 246] untravelled American or he who has “been there” without seeing things, is not aware that distinctly different conditions prevail in Europe than with us, especially above latitude 40°.
Advantage in the paintability of subject therefore lies distinctly with the European artist, and it may be because he has to labor against these odds that the American landscapist has forged to the front and is now leading his European brethren. It must, however, be acknowledged that he acquired what he knows concerning landscape from the art and nature of Europe—from Impressionism with its important legacy of color, which has been acknowledged in varying degree by all our painters, and from the “school of 1830,” on which is based the tonal movement of the present.
Other than perspective of values, no importance should be attached to that which, with the inartistic mind, is regarded so important a quality. The art instruction which the common school of the past generation offered was based on perspective, its problems, susceptible of never ending circumventions, being spread in an interminable maze before the student. Great respect for this “lion in the path” was a natural result and “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.