going to paint, remember that
too much of an undertaking will not give you any more beauty in the
picture, and may lead to discouragement.

In the Chapter on "Still Life" I will explain more practically the
means you may take, and how you may take them, to the end of making
composition a practical study to you.

CHAPTER XXI

COLOR

The subject of color naturally divides, for the painter, into two
branches,--color as a _quality_, and color as _material_. Considered
in the former class, it divides into an abstract a theoretical and a
scientific subject; considered in the latter, it is a material and
technical one. The material and technical side has been treated of in
the Chapter on "Pigments." In this chapter we will have to do with
color considered as an aesthetic element.

=The Abstract.=--The quality of _color_ is the third of the great
elements or qualities, through the management of which the painter
works aesthetically.

Just as he uses all the material elements of his picture as the means
of making concrete and visible those combinations of line and mass
which go to the making of the aesthetic structure, so he uses these in
the expression of the ideal in combinations of color. In this relation
nothing stands to him for what it is, but for what it may be made to
do for the color-scheme of his picture. If he wants a certain red in a
certain place, he wants it because it is red, and it makes little
difference to him, _thinking in color_, whether that red note is
actually made by a file of red-coated soldiers, by a scarlet ribbon,
or by a lobster. The scarlet spot is what he is thinking of, and what
object most naturally and rightly gives it to him is a matter to be
decided by the demands of the subject of the picture; and its fitness
as to that is the only thing which has any influence beyond the main
fact that red color is needed at that point. If he were a designer of
conventional ornament, the color problem would be the same. At that
point a spot of red would be needed, and a spot of paint would do it.
The painter thinks in color the same way, but he expresses himself in
different materials.

=The Ideal.=--This is the reason that a still-life painting is as
interesting to a painter as a subject which to another finds its great
interest in the telling of a story. To the painter the story, or the
objects which tell it, are of minor importa