occupy. And don't fill up these spaces with background
objects. That will not bind the group together, but will separate it.
Fill the spaces with air and with values--even more important!

All this arranged, paint each group and each figure as if it were one
thing instead of many. As you treat the head, the body, the dress, and
the chair as all parts of a whole in a single sitting figure, so treat
the various heads, bodies, dresses, etc., in a group as parts of a
whole, by studying always the relations of each to each. And then
study to keep the different groups as parts of whole canvas in the
same way.

=Simplicity of Subject.=--But do not be too ambitious in your
attempts. Keep your subjects simple. Don't be in a hurry to paint many
figures. Paint one figure well before you try several.

You will find plenty of scope for your knowledge and skill in single
figures. Practise with sketches and compositions, if you will, in
grouping several figures, and try to manage them so that the whole
shall be simple in mass and effect; but do not attempt, as a student,
without experience and skill in the painting of one figure, to paint
pictures containing several. By the time you can really paint a single
figure well, you can dispense with a manual of painting, and branch
out as ambitiously as you please. In the meantime, everything that
you have knowledge enough to express well, you can express with the
single figure.

With the model, the background, the pose and occupation, the clothing
and draperies, and whatever accessories may be natural to the thing as
elements, it is possible to work out all the problems of line and mass
and color. If a really fine thing cannot be made with one figure, more
figures will only make it worse.

Look again at Whistler's portrait of his mother. Consider it now, not
as a portrait, but as a single figure. What are the qualities of it
which would be helped if there were more in it? The very simplicity of
it makes the handling of it more masterly.

Look also at the one simple figure of Millet's "Sower;" all the great
qualities of painting that are likely to get themselves onto one
canvas you will find in this.

See what movement and dignity there are in it. How statuesque it is!
It is monumental. It has scale; it imposes its own standard of
measurement. There are air and envelopment and light and breadth. Are
these not qualities enough for one canvas?

=Nature the Suggester.=--Take your sugg