der
Italian skies, where sometimes for days together the light is the
same, the skies being one expanse of soft, opalescent blue, you might
think under such influence it would be possible for you to perform the
great almanac trick successfully in your sketch. But how about
yourself? Are you the same man to-day that you were yesterday? If so,
perhaps you might also find yourself in exactly the same frame of mind
that existed when your sketch was half finished. But would you
guarantee that you would be the same man for a week?

I believe we can maintain this position of the necessity of rapid work
in out-of-door sketches by looking for a moment at the product of the
best men of the last century, some of whom I have already mentioned.
Take Corot, for instance. Corot, as you know, spent almost his entire
life painting the early light of the morning. An analysis of his
life's work shows that he must have folded his umbrella and gone home
before eleven o'clock. My own idea is that many hundreds of his
canvases, which have since sold at many thousands of francs, were
perfectly finished in one sitting. This cannot be otherwise when you
remember that one dealer in Paris claims to have sold two thousand
Corots. These one-sitting pictures to me express his best work. In the
larger canvases in which figures are introduced--notably the one first
owned by the late Mr. Charles A. Dana, of New York, called "Apollo," I
believe--the treatment of the sky and foreground shows careful
repainting, and while the mechanical process of the brush, shown by
the over and under painting, the dragging of opaque color over
transparent, may produce certain translucencies which the more
forcible and direct stroke of the brush--one touch and no more--fails
to give, still the whole composition lacks that intimacy with nature
which one always feels in the smaller and more rapidly perfected
canvases.

Note, too, the sketches of Frans Hals and see what power comes from
the sure touch of a well-directed brush in the hand of a man who used
it to express his thoughts as other men use chords of music or
paragraphs in literature. A man who made no false moves, who knew that
every stroke of his brush must express a perfect sentence and that it
could never be recalled. Really the work of such a master is like the
gesture of an actor--if it is right a thrill goes through you, if it
is wrong it is like that player friend of Hamlet's who sawed the air.

This qual