for, what we
expect to find; anything out of the ordinary is hard to believe at
first. In looking at nature the average observer does not even see the
obvious. Certain general facts he accepts in the general, but as a
rule there is no real recognition of what is there; no perception of
the relations of things; no analysis; no real _seeing_, only a
conventional acceptance of a thing as a _thing_. Men look at nature
with one idea, and at a picture of nature with an entirely different
idea. Nature in the picture is to most people just what they have been
accustomed to see in other pictures. They get their idea of how nature
looks from those pictures, and if you show them a picture differently
conceived they have difficulty in taking it in.

For this reason the "bright picture" does not "look right." I remember
being asked by a man in a modern exhibition what I thought of "these
bright pictures." When I asked which pictures he had reference to, I
found that he meant the work of a man whose whole aim in painting
landscape was, as he once said to me, to get "the just note" in color
and value. One would think that the fact that the whole force of an
extremely able and sincere mind was directed to that purpose, would
produce a picture with at least truth of observation. Yet this was not
what my passing acquaintance wanted to see. The picture he liked,
which "had some nature in it," as he pointed out to me, was an
extremely commonplace landscape with a black tree against a garish
sky, reflected in a pool of water. The "bright picture" seemed to me
exquisitely gray and quiet, though high in key, and the one with
"nature in it," harsh and crude, but conventional; and that was just
the point. The average observer wants to see, and does see, in nature
what he is accustomed to accept in a picture as nature.

But a painter cannot go on such a basis. He may paint a dark picture,
but he must find a subject which is dark to do so. He may not paint
daylight with false pitch and false relations, and say he sees it so.
With every liberty for personal seeing, there are still certain facts
so established and obvious that personality must take them and deal
with them, must use them and not ignore them, in its self-expression.

[Illustration: =On the Race Track.= _Degas._
To show relations of pitch and contrast out-doors.]

The pitch of daylight is one of these facts. Light and luminosity may
not be qualities which appeal to your temperamen