e to work not more than an hour and a
half or two hours, and have no more flowers in your sketch than you
can complete in that time.

When you sketch, quite as much as when you work at more ambitious
canvases, get the mass first, especially if the group is large. Then
put in the accents which do most to give the character or type of the
flower. Make studies of single flowers and sketches of groups. In the
study search detail and modelling; in the sketch search relations and
relief, effect and large accent.

CHAPTER XXX

PORTRAITS

Don't look upon portraits as something any one can do. A portrait is
more than a likeness, and the painting of it gives scope for all of
the great qualities possible in art. Only a great painter can paint a
great portrait. Some great painters rest their fame on work in this
field, and others have added by this to the fame derived from other
kinds of work.

You must not think it easy to paint a portrait, or rest satisfied with
having got a likeness. Likeness is a very commonplace thing, which
almost any one can get. If there were no other qualities to be tried
for, it would hardly be worth while to paint a portrait. Back of the
likeness, which a few superficial lines may give, is the character,
which needs not only skill and power to express but great perception
to see, and judgment to make use of to the best advantage.

=Character.=--The first requisite in a good portrait is
character,--more than likeness, more than color or grace, before
everything else, it needs this; nothing can take the place of it and
make a portrait in any real sense of the word. Everything else may be
added to this, and the picture be only so much the greater; but this
is the fundamental beauty of the portrait. Some of the greatest
painters made pictures which were very beautiful, yet the greatest
beauty lay in the perception and expression of character. Holbein's
wonderful work is the apotheosis of the direct, simple, sincere
expression of character in the most frank and unaffected rectitude of
drawing. There are masterpieces of Albrecht Duerer which rest on the
same qualities, as you can see in the Portrait of Himself by Duerer.
Likeness is incidental to character; get that, and the likeness will
be there in spite of you.

Hubert Herkomer said once that he did not try for likeness; if only he
got the right values in the right places, the liken