ecause they themselves are nature: therefore one must live among them,
and absorb them.

It is the same in the painting of the great ages. Do you think, when I
tell you to copy, that I want to make copyists of you? No, I want you to
take the sap from the plant.

_Ingres._

LXIII

The strict copying of nature is not art; it is only a means to an end,
an element in the whole. Art, while presenting nature, must manifest
itself in its own essence. It is not a mirror, uncritically reflecting
every image; it is the artist who must mould the image to his will; else
his work is not performed.

_Bracquemond._

LXIV

Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as
the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to
pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the
result may be beautiful; as the musician gathers his notes, and forms
his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to
the player that he may sit on the piano.

_Whistler._

LXV

When you have thoroughly learnt perspective, and have fixed in your
memory all the various parts and forms of things, you should often amuse
yourself when you take a walk for recreation, in watching and taking
note of the attitudes and actions of men as they talk and dispute, or
laugh or come to blows one with another, both their actions and those of
the bystanders who either intervene or stand looking on at these things;
noting these down with rapid strokes in this way, in a little
pocket-book, which you ought always to carry with you. And let this be
of tinted paper, so that it may not be rubbed out; but you should change
the old for a new one, for these are not things to be rubbed out but
preserved with the utmost diligence; for there is such an infinite
number of forms and actions of things that the memory is incapable of
preserving them, and therefore you should keep those (sketches) as your
patterns and teachers.

_Leonardo._

LXVI

Two men stop to talk together: I pencil them in detail, beginning at the
head, for example; they separate and I have nothing but a fragment on my
paper. Some children are sitting on the steps of a church; I begin,
their mother calls them; my sketch-book becomes filled with tips of
noses and locks of hair. I make a resolution not to go home without a
whole figure, and I try for the first t