ples which can always be made to apply to each single
need, and I will try to show how the application may be made.

=Technique.=--The science of painting consists of a variety of
processes by means of which a canvas is covered with pigment, and
various objects are represented thereon. The whole body of method and
means is called technique; the several parts of technique are called
by names of their own. That part which applies to the putting on of
the paint may be generally called _handling_, although the word
_painting_ is sometimes restricted to this sense, and _brush-work_ is
often used for the same thing. The other technical means will be
spoken of in their proper place. Let me say now a few words as to
_handling_ in general.

Where did all this technique come from?

From experiment.

Ever since art began, men have been searching for means of fixing
ideas upon surfaces. But it is only within the last four hundred years
that the processes of oil painting have been in existence--simply
because they are peculiar to the use of pigments ground in oil as a
vehicle, and the oil medium was not invented until the middle of the
fifteenth century.

With the invention of this medium new possibilities came into the
world, and a continual succession of painters have been inventing ways
of putting on paint, the result being the stock of methods and
processes of handling which are the groundwork of the art of painting
to-day.

From time to time there have been groups of artists who have used
common methods, and who have developed expression through those
methods which became characteristic of their epoch; and because the
resulting pictures were of a high degree of perfection, their methods
of handling acquired an authority which had a very determining effect
on different periods of painting.

In this way have come those ideas as to what kind of painting or what
ways of putting paint on canvas should be accepted as "legitimate."
And the methods accepted as legitimate or condemned as illegitimate
have been varied from time to time--those condemned by one period
being advocated by another; and the processes themselves have been
almost as varied as the periods or groups of men using them.

In the long run, methods and processes have received such
authoritative sanction from having been each and all used by undoubted
masters, that they have become the traditional property of all art,
which any one is free to use as he finds