f color and value, and the whole art
of painting, rested on the comprehension and observance of these
facts.

He said that as the planes of any form turned towards or away from the
light and so got more or less of it, and as one form stood more or
less far back of another and the atmosphere came between, the color
and value changed; and in the observance of this, and its
representation as applied to any and every object or group of objects,
lay the whole of painting. All the possible beauties of the art rested
on it. He showed a painting of a single pear in which these things
were most subtly observed, and said that that painting was as complete
and perfect as any painting he could do simply because in the
observance of these relations was implied the observance of everything
which was vital to painting.

=Short Sittings.=--This characteristic, and the steady change of
position of the sun and its effects on all the objects which are
directly lighted by it, make it necessary, whenever you are painting
from nature out-of-doors, that you should not paint at one thing very
long at a time. The light changes pretty rapidly; at high noon it only
takes a few moments to exactly reverse the light. It is seldom that
you can do any just study for more than an hour or an hour and a half
at a sitting. Some men do work two or three hours, but they are not
studying justly all that time; for that which was light is dark three
hours later, and any true study of value and color is impossible under
these conditions. Of course on gray days this is less marked, but you
must suit your sittings to the time and facts.

It would be better if you had more canvases, and worked a short time
on each, and many days on all. You would have the truest work.

Monet works never more than a half-hour on one canvas; but when he
starts out he takes a half-dozen or more different canvases, and
paints on each till the light has changed. Theodore Robinson seldom
worked more than three-quarters of an hour, or at most an hour, on one
canvas; but, he worked for twenty or thirty days on each canvas, and
sometimes had a single canvas under way for successive seasons.

Any man who would truly study for the just value and note of color
must work more or less in this way when he works out-of-doors.

CHAPTER XXXII

MARINES

All that has been said on landscape painting applies to marines. You
ha