er by men
who in some degree represent that school, but to my mind have done
work equally good--even Montenard and Cazin--that all these masters
have loved, sought for, and expressed in their work this
all-prevailing quality, the gray.

A few very simple rules for testing the power, presence, and quality
of the prevailing gray in nature are so easily learned and so
convincing in their application that once applied they are never
forgotten.

Take, for instance, a morning in late spring or early summer, when all
nature is dressed from tree-top to grass-blade in a suit of vivid
green. To a tyro with so dangerous a weapon as a color-box, there is
nothing that will really bring down this game but some explosive
composed of indigo and Indian yellow, or Prussian blue and light
cadmium--perhaps the strongest mixture of vivid raw green.

Now, pluck a single leaf from a near-by branch, hold it close to one
eye, and with this as a guide note the difference in color tones
between it and the leaves on the tree from which you plucked the leaf
and which you had believed to be a vivid green. To your surprise, the
leaf itself, even with the sun shining through it, is many tones lower
and grayer than the color of the near-by branch as depicted on your
paper, while the near-by branch, in comparison, pales into a sable
gray-green, which you could perhaps get with yellow ochre, blue-black,
and a touch of chrome-yellow.

It does not seem to me that I can better illustrate this quality of
the gray than by rapidly going over some of the works of George Inness
lately on exhibition in New York--certainly to me the most marvellous
examples of the power of a human mind to harmonize the subtle
colorings of nature. I select Inness not only because he is to me one
of the great landscape-painters of his day, but because he chooses a
very wide range of subjects, from early morning to twilight,
expressing these truthfully, absolutely, perfectly, so far as local
color is concerned--that is, of course, as I see through either my own
spectacles or Inness's; but, then, remember, our eyes may need repair.
When these canvases are analyzed we find in the range of color nothing
stronger than yellow ochre in yellows, than light red in reds, and,
with hardly an exception, blue-black for blues. Indeed, his usual
palette, as does Mauve's and Cazin's, seems to me to be only yellow
ochre and blue-black, and with these two colors he expresses the
whole range of