any
prejudices as to the surface effect of paint. Whether the canvas be
smooth or rough, the paint thick or thin, the details few or
many,--the goodness or badness of the picture does not depend on any
of these. They are or should be the result, the natural outcome
because the natural means of expression, of the manner in which the
picture is conceived. One picture may demand one way of painting and
another demand a quite different way; and each way be the best
possible for the thing expressed. It all depends on the man; the
make-up of his mind; the way he sees things; the results he aims to
attain,--all of them controlled more or less by temperament and
idiosyncrasy. What would produce a perfect work for one man would not
do at all for another. The works of the great masters offer the most
marked contrasts of ideal and of treatment, and painters have varied
greatly in their manner of some painting at different periods of their
lives. Rembrandt, for instance, painted very thinly in his early
years, with transparent shadows and carefully modelled, solidly loaded
lights. Later in life he painted most roughly; and "The Syndics" was
so heavily and roughly loaded that even now, after two hundred years,
the paint stands out in lumps--and this is one of his masterpieces. So
again, if you will compare the manipulation in the work of Raphael
with that of Tintoretto, that of Rubens with that of Velasquez, or
most markedly, the work of Frans Hals with that of Gerard Dou, you
will see that the greatest extremes of handling are consistent with
equal greatness of result.

=Finish.=--From this you may conclude that what is generally
understood by the word "finish" is not necessarily a thing to be
sought for. The tendency of great painters is rather away from
excessive smoothness and detail than towards it. While a picture may
be a good one and be very minute and smooth, it by no means follows
that a picture is bad because it is rough. The truth is that the test
of a picture does not lie in the character of the pigment surface _in
itself_ at all, nor in whether it be full of detail or the reverse,
but in the conception and in the harmonious relation of the technique
to the manner in which the whole is conceived. The true "finish" is
whatever surface the picture happens to have when the idea which is
the purpose of the picture is fully expressed, with nothing lacking to
make that expression more complete, nor with anything present whi