“It’s all a question of balance,” she said. “The great mass of white paper in the lower right hand part of the picture balances the mass of green leaves in the upper left hand corner. The green is a heavier looking color than the white, and it therefore takes a larger amount of white to balance the green. The Japanese who made this painting understood that, and he has so arranged his leaves and his grasshopper, that the eye is entirely pleased by the balance that results. If Rosa Bonheur has managed wisely there should be masses of light and dark, balancing each other, and there should be spaces and solids, balancing each other.”
“Has she done it? It doesn’t worry me any,” said Roger. “I think she must have succeeded.”
Keeping Miss Graham’s explanation in mind they took another look at the Napoleon picture and concluded that Meissonier also knew what he was about.
“‘Composition’ means the putting together of a picture, doesn’t it?” asked Helen. “I should think that the composition of a picture that has so many figures, must be extremely difficult.”
“Far more difficult, of course, than one for which the artist has selected fewer objects.”
“And of two artists producing complicated pictures like these, he is the better who gives an effect of simplicity.”
“Suppose that Rosa Bonheur had noticed that one of the men struggling with the horses had his face bound up with a cloth; does that have anything to do with the picture?”
They all agreed that it had not.
“Then she was perfectly right to leave out any object that would distract the observer’s mind. She put into this picture of horses going to the horse fair only such things as would make the onlooker think of the beauty and spirit of the horses as shown by their handsome coats and by the difficulty which the men had in controlling them, and his imagination would be stirred to wonder as to which of these fine animals was to win a prize. Everything which might compete with these simple ideas the artist left out of the picture.”
“It must have been awfully hard to do such a lot of legs,” said Ethel Blue, who knew a little about drawing.