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,oil painting for sale, 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. oil paintings on canvas for sale
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. abstract oil paintings on canvas
This quality of "the stroke," by the by, if we stop to analyze for a moment,
is the stroke that comes straight from the heart, tingling up the spinal column,
down the arm, and straight to the finger-tips. Ole Bull had it when his violin
echoed a full orchestra; Paderewski has it when he rings clearly and sharply
some note that vibrates through you for hours after; Booth had it when drawing himself up to
his full height as Cardinal Richelieu he began that famous speech, "Around her
form I draw the holy circle of our faith"—his upraised finger a barrier that an
army could not break down; Velasquez, in his marvellous picture in the Museum of
the Prado in Madrid of "The Topers" ("Los Borrachos"); Frans Hals, in almost
every canvas that his brush touched; and in later years our own John Sargent, in
many of his portraits, but especially in his direct out-of-door studies, shows
it; as do scores of others whose sureness of touch and exact knowledge have made
their names household words where art is loved and genius held sacred. abstract oil paintings for sale
And with this ability to record swiftly and surely there will come a certain
enthusiasm, fanned to white heat when, some morning, trap in hand, you are
searching for something to paint, your mind entirely filled with a certain object (you propose to
paint boats if you please, and you have walked around them for minutes trying to
get the best view and deciding upon the all-important best possible
composition)—when, turning suddenly, you face a mass of buildings and a sweep of
river that instantly put to flight every idea concerning your first subject, and
in a moment a new arrangement is evolved and you are working like mad. It is
only under this pressure ofenthusiasm that the best work is produced. abstract oil painting on canvas
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