e way the stem loses itself in the leaves, are
more true than the monotonous though graceful leaf-drawing which, before
Turner's time, had been employed, even by the best masters, in their
distant masses. Fig. 27 is sufficiently characteristic of the manner of
the old wood-cuts after Titian; in which, you see, the leaves are too
much of one shape, like bunches of fruit; and the boughs too completely
seen, besides being somewhat soft and leathery in aspect, owing to the
want of angles in their outline. By great men like Titian, this somewhat
conventional structure was only given in haste to distant masses; and
their exquisite delineation of the foreground, kept their
conventionalism from degeneracy: but in the drawings of the Carracci and
other derivative masters, the conventionalism prevails everywhere, and
sinks gradually into scrawled work, like Fig. 28, about the worst which
it is possible to get into the habit of using, though an ignorant person
might perhaps suppose it more "free," and therefore better than Fig. 26.
Note also, that in noble outline drawing, it does not follow that a
bough is wrongly drawn, because it looks contracted unnaturally
somewhere, as in Fig. 26, just above the foliage. Very often the
muscular action which is to be expressed by the line runs into the
middle of the branch, and the actual outline of the branch at that place
may be dimly seen, or not at all; and it is then only by the future
shade that its actual shape, or the cause of its disappearance, will be
indicated.

[Illustration: FIG. 27.]

140. One point more remains to be noted about trees, and I have done. In
the minds of our ordinary water-color artists a distant tree seems only
to be conceived as a flat green blot, grouping pleasantly with other
masses, and giving cool color to the landscape, but differing no wise,
in texture, from the blots of other shapes which these painters use to
express stones, or water, or figures. But as soon as you have drawn
trees carefully a little while, you will be impressed, and impressed
more strongly the better you draw them, with the idea of their
_softness_ of surface. A distant tree is not a flat and even piece of
color, but a more or less globular mass of a downy or bloomy texture,
partly passing into a misty vagueness. I find, practically, this lovely
softness of far-away trees the most difficult of all characters to
reach, because it cannot be got by mere scratching or roughening the
surfa