delicacies will come later. But you
must get the important things first. Learn to be strong _first_, or
you never will be. Delicacy comes after strength, not before.

So, too, freedom comes after knowledge--is the result of knowledge. So
paint to learn. If it is rigid at first and hard, never mind. Get the
understanding and the representation as well as you can, and try for
other things later.

[Illustration: =Haystacks in Sunshine.= _Monet._
To show certain characteristics of handling in "Impressionist" work.]

CHAPTER XXXI

LANDSCAPE

From the usual rating of figures as the most important branch of
painting, it would be natural to speak of that kind of work first. But
work from the head must come before you attempt the figure, and there
are a good many things that you can learn from landscape which will
help you in figure-work. The manner of painting figures has been much
modified, too, of late years, owing to certain qualities and points of
view which are due to the study of landscape and the important
position that it has come to occupy.

In the old days landscape was only a secondary thing, not only as a
branch of art in itself, but particularly as it was used by figure
painters. In this century it has so broadened in its scope that it is
now recognized to be as important a field of work as any. But further
than this, it has become the most influential study in the whole range
of painting. From the development of the study of outdoor nature, and
particularly outdoor light, it has come about that certain facts of
nature have been recognized which were before neglected, ignored, or
unsuspected, and these facts bear quite as much on the painting of the
figure as on the painting of landscape. So that it is no more possible
to paint the figure, in some respects, as it was painted as a matter
of course a hundred years ago, while other ways of painting the
figure, which were undreamed of at that time, are the matters of
course now.

The whole problem of light has taken a new phase, and the treatment of
color in that relation is modified in the painting of figures as well
as in the other branches of work.

=Pitch.=--In no direction is this more marked than in the matter of
_pitch_, or _key_. With the study of landscape, the range of gradation
from light to dark has broadened. A picture may now be painted in a
"high key;" the picture may be, from