We might further differentiate art as, on the one hand, the image of the outward vision, and, on the other, as the outcome or image of the inner vision.
The first kind would include all portraiture, by which I mean faithful portrayal or transcript whether of animate or inanimate nature; while the second would include all imaginative conceptions, decorative designs, and pattern inventions.
The outward vision obviously relies upon what the eye perceives in nature. Its virtue consists in the faithfulness and truth of its graphic record, in the penetrating force of observation of fact, and the representative power by which they are reproduced on paper or canvas, clay or marble.
The image of the inner vision is also a record, but of a different order of fact. It may be often of unconscious impressions and memories which are retained and recur with all or more than the vividness of actuality—the tangible forms of external nature calling up answering, but not identical, images in the mind, like reflections in a mirror or in still water, which are similar but never the same as the objects they reflect.
But the inner vision is not bound by the appearances of the particular moment. It is the record of the sum of many moments, and retains the typical impress of multitudinous and successive impressions—like the composite photograph, where faces may be printed one over another until the result is a more typical image than any individual one taken separately.