nged. For the first time out-of-door values were studied as
things in themselves interesting and important. The result on
landscape pictures was that pictures painted in the studio seemed
unreal and insincere, and that men looked and studied less for the
making of pictures, and more for what nature had to reveal.

It would be a good thing for you as a student if you would do as these
men did whenever you want to do any work at landscape, whether for
itself, or for background. If you wish to pose any kind of figure with
landscape background, pose and paint your figure out-of-doors. Make
sketches as much as you please, make studies as much as you please;
but make them for the suggestions and knowledge they will give you,
and not for material to be used in painting a picture at home. For
your picture, start, and go on with, and finish it out-doors; you will
get a feeling of freshness and truth in your work which you cannot get
any other way. You will also acquire a power of concentration and of
selection and rejection in the presence of nature which is of the
utmost importance to you.

=Impressionism.=--It is not possible to speak of landscape and _plein
air_ without mention of the "Impressionists." You should understand
what "impressionism" really is, and what it is not, and what the
impressionist stands for. Whether we like it or not, this work is not
to be ignored. It has tried for certain things, and has shown that
they can be much more justly represented than had before been believed
to be possible, and fad or no fad, that result stands.

In the first place, impressionism does not mean "purple and yellow."
Any one who says "purple and yellow" and throws the whole thing aside,
is a very superficial critic. The purple and yellow are incidental to
the impressionist, not essential. It is only one of the ways of
handling color by means of which it was found possible to express
certain qualities of light.

Before everything else the real impressionist stands for the
representation of the personal conception and method as against the
traditional. He believes that if a man has anything of his own to say,
he must say it in his own way; and that if he cannot find that nature
has anything to say to him personally, if nature cannot give him a
personal message, if he can only paint by giving another man's ideas
and another man's method, then he had better not paint at all; so that
whatever he may see to paint, and however he f