ression when a brush
full of paint is in your hands. The reducing of a complicated appearance
to a few simple masses is the first necessity of the painter. But
this will be fully explained in a later chapter treating more
practically of the practice of mass drawing.

[Illustration: Plate X.

EXAMPLE OF FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CHINESE WORK BY LUI LIANG (BRITISH MUSEUM)

Showing how early Chinese masters had developed the mass-drawing point
of view.]

The art of China and Japan appears to have been more [influenced by this
view of natural appearances than that of the West has been, until quite
lately. The Eastern mind does not seem to be so obsessed by the
objectivity of things as is the Western mind. With us the practical
sense of touch is all powerful. "I know that is so, because I felt it
with my hands" would be a characteristic expression with us. Whereas I
do not think it would be an expression the Eastern mind would use. With
them the spiritual essence of the thing seen appears to be the more
real, judging from their art. And who is to say they may not be right?
This is certainly the impression one gets from their beautiful painting,
with its lightness of texture and avoidance of solidity. It is founded
on nature regarded as a flat vision, instead of a collection of solids
in space. Their use of line is also much more restrained than with us,
and it is seldom used to accentuate the solidity of things, but chiefly
to support the boundaries of masses and suggest detail. Light and shade,
which suggest solidity, are never used, a wide light where there is no
shadow pervades everything, their drawing being done with the brush in
masses.

When, as in the time of Titian, the art of the West had discovered light
and shade, linear perspective, aerial perspective, &c., and had begun by
fusing the edges of the masses to suspect the necessity of painting to a
widely diffused focus, they had got very near considering appearances
as a visual whole. But it was not until Velazquez that a picture was
painted that was founded entirely on visual appearances, in which a
basis of objective outlines was discarded and replaced by a structure of
tone masses.

When he took his own painting room with the little Infanta and her maids
as a subject, Velazquez seems to have considered it entirely as one flat
visual impression. The focal attention is centred on the Infanta, with
the figures on either side more or less out of focus, those on the