the color scheme in nature, with the varying lights of
day and night, except in depicting sunsets.

* * * * *

After the salient features of a landscape have been analyzed and
recorded in color, the more subtle qualities are to be detected and
expressed. The most important of these is the time of day. To an
outdoor painter--an expert examining the work of another expert--the
hour-hand is written over every square inch of the canvas. He knows
from the angle of the shadows just how high the sun was in the
heavens, and he knows, too, from the local color of the shadows
whether it is a silvery light of the morning, the glare of noontime,
or the deepening golden glow of the afternoon. In fact, if you will
think for a moment, the shadow of an overhanging balcony upon a white
wall is a perfect sun-dial for him, and this test can be indefinitely
applied to every part of the picture.

The next is the temperature: how hot or how cold it was--what month in
the year? It is unnecessary for Inness to cover his ground with snow
to make his picture express a certain degree of cold, neither is it
necessary for Montenard to fill his Provencal roads with clouds of
dust to show how hot they are. This is done by the opalescent tones of
the sky, by the values expressed in reflected lights and in the
illuminated shadows, so that you feel in looking across one of
Inness's fields of brown grass just how late is the autumn and just
how cool it has been, and in looking down one of Montenard's roads you
realize how useless would be an overcoat.

[Illustration: Under the Willows, Cookham-on-Thames]

In this connection let me say that all nature is interesting and all
nature is beautiful, but all nature, as I have said, is not paintable.
The interior of a railroad station, for instance, is interesting,
as giving you certain mechanical results, construction, but it is not
picturesque--that is, paintable--unless one could treat it as Pennell
does, contrasting the black cars and locomotive with a puff of white
steam, giving the vistas with the perspective of track, and a centre
mass of people adding an idea of movement and color.

Above all, the outdoor painter should get the character and feeling of
the place he portrays on his canvas. If in Spain, his picture must
look like Spain. The air must be transparent, the architecture
clean-cut against the azure. If it be Holland, the atmosphere must be
moist, the air lik