cludes science.
What I desire to enforce is the great truth that _within_ the art of
painting there exists, flourishes and advances a noble and glorious
_science_ which is essential and progressive."

"Any one who can learn to write can learn to draw;" and every one who can
learn to draw should learn to _compose_ pictures. That all do not is in
evidence in the work of the many accomplished draughtsmen who have
delineated their ideas on canvas and paper from the time of the earliest
masters to the present day, wherein the ability to produce the details of
form is manifest in all parts of the work, but in the combination of those
parts the first intention of their presence has lost force.

Composition is the science of combination, and the art of the world has
progressed as do the processes of the kindergarten. Artists first
received form; then color; the materials, then the synthesis of the two.
Notable examples of the world's great compositions may be pointed to in
the work of the Renaissance painters, and such examples will be cited; but
the major portion of the art by which these exceptions were surrounded
offers the same proportion of good to bad as the inverse ratio would
to-day.

Without turning to serious argument at this point, a superficial one,
which will appeal to most art tourists, whether professional or lay, is
found in the relief experienced in passing from the galleries of the old
to those of the new art in Europe, in that one finds repose and
experiences a relief of mental tension, discovering with the latter the
balance of line, of mass and of color, and that general simplicity so
necessary to harmony, which suggests that the weakness of the older art
lay in the last of the three essentials of painting; form, color and
composition. The low-toned harmonies of time-mellowed color we would be
loath to exchange for aught else, except for that element of disturbance
so vague and so difficult of definition, namely, lack of composition.

[Fundamental Forms of Construction]

In the single case of portrait composition of two figures (more difficult
than of one, three or more) it is worthy of note how far beyond the older
are the later masters; or in the case of the grouping of landscape
elements, or in the arrangement of figures or animals _in_ landscape, how
a finer sense in such arrangement has come to art. Masterful composition
of many figures however has never been surpassed in cer