amental to character._ If you will not take the trouble to study
the character of any least thing you put in, don't put it in at all.
Nothing is important enough to put in, if it is not important enough
to have its character and its purpose in the picture understood.

I spoke of structure in speaking of the head. If I said nothing but
"structure, structure, structure" to the end of the section, you would
get the impression of what is the most important thing in drawing. If
you will look for and find the line and proportion expressing the
anatomy which makes the thing fulfil its particular function in the
world, you will understand its character, and that is what is
important, everywhere.

=Work in Season.=--Make your picture in the season which it
represents. I don't say that a good summer picture may not be made in
winter; but I do say that you are more likely to express the summer
quality while the summer is around you. There is too much half
painting of pictures, and then leaving them to be "finished up"
afterwards.

Of course you can make all your studies and sketches, and then begin
and finish the picture from them. If you are careful to have plenty of
material, to accumulate all your facts with the intention of working
from those facts, all right; but it would be better if you were to
work your picture in the season of it, as long as you are a student at
least. For until you have had a great deal of experience, you will
find when you come to paint your picture that some very much needed
material you have neglected to collect, and you cannot safely supply
it from memory. If this occurs in the time of year represented in the
picture, you can just go out and study it.

=Out-of-door Landscapes.=--The most important movement in modern art,
the most important in its effects on all kinds of work, is what I have
mentioned as the _plein air_ movement. It was thought by some
clear-headed men that the best way to paint an out-door picture was to
take their canvases out-of-doors to paint it. Instead of working from
a few color sketches and many pencil studies, they painted the whole
picture from first to last in the open air. Working in this way,
certain qualities got into the pictures unavoidably. Necessarily the
color was fresher and truer. Necessarily there was more breadth and
frankness, and less conventionality and mere picture-making. The
spirit of the open got onto the canvas, and the whole type of picture
was cha