ict adherence to this law of one supreme light and one supreme
dark does Mauve's work, as it were, get back from and out of his
canvas, as from the record of a phonograph into which some soul has
breathed its own precise purpose and intent.

So, too, does nature often call out to you fixing your attention,
often shrouding in shadow the unimportant in the landscape, while high
up above the gloom it holds up to your gaze a white candle of a
minaret or the bared breast of an Alpine peak reflecting the loving
look of a tired sunbeam bidding it good-night.

* * * * *

To accent the more strongly the value of this dominant light even
though it be treated in very low gradation, I recall that a year ago
the art world was startled by the sum received for a medium sized
picture of some coryphees painted by Degas, now an old man over eighty
years old--a subject which he always loved and, indeed, which he has
painted many times. Some thirty years ago, when he was comparatively a
young man, I saw, at the Bartholdi exhibition in New York, a picture
by this master of these same coryphees, two figures standing together
in the flies resting their weary, pink, fishworm legs as they balanced
themselves with their hands against the wabbling scenery. It was a
wholly gray picture, and almost in a monotone, and yet the flashes of
their diamond earrings, no larger than the point of a pin, were
distinctly visible, holding their place in, if not dominating, the
whole color scheme.

Again, in that marvellous portrait of Wertheimer, the bric-a-brac
dealer, if you remember, the eye first catches the strong vermilion
touch on the lower lip, and then, knowing that a master like Sargent
would not leave it isolated, one finds, to one's delight and joy, a
little swipe of red on the tongue of the barely discernible black
poodle squatting at his feet. Had the red of the dog's tongue
predominated, we should never have been thrilled and fascinated by one
of the great portraits of this or any other time.

This is also true in other great portraits--in, for instance, the
pictures of Rembrandt, Vandyck, and Frans Hals, especially where a
face is relieved by the addition of a hand and the white of a ruff.
Somewhere in that warm expanse of the face there can be found a
pinhead of color, brighter and more dominating than any other brush
touch on the canvas. It may be the high egg-light in the forehead, or
the click on the tip