Note 2 — Chapter II · INDIVIDUALITY OR THE PERSONAL ELEMENT

This matter of personality and choice is well illustrated by Mr. La Farge in his “Considerations on Painting.” He says (p. 71): “I remember myself, years ago, sketching with two well-known men, artists who were great friends, great cronies, asking each other all the time how to do this and how to do that! but absolutely different in the texture of their minds and in the result that they wished to obtain, so far as the pictures and drawings by which they were well known to the public are concerned.

“What we made, or rather, I should say, what we wished to note, was merely a memorandum of the passing effect upon the hills that lay before us. We had no idea of expressing ourselves or of studying in any way the subject for any future use. We merely had the intention to note this affair rapidly, and we had all used the same words to express to each other what we liked in it. There were big clouds rolling over hills, sky clearing above, dots of trees and water and meadow land below; and the ground fell away suddenly before us. Well, our three sketches were in the first place different in shape; either from our physical differences, or from a habit of drawing certain shapes of a picture, which itself usually indicates—as you know or ought to know—whether we are looking far or near. Two were oblong, but of different proportions; one was more nearly a square: the distance taken into the right and left was smaller in the latter case, and, on the contrary, the height up and down—that is to say, the portion of land beneath and the portion of sky above—was greater. In each picture the distance bore a different relation to the foreground. In each picture the clouds were treated with different precision and different attention. In one picture the open sky was the main intention of the picture. In two pictures the upper sky was of no consequence—it was the clouds and the mountains that were insisted upon. The drawing was the same—that is to say, the general make of things—but each man had involuntarily looked upon what was most interesting to him in the whole sight; and though the whole sight was what he meant to represent, he had unconsciously preferred a beauty or interest different from what his neighbors liked.

“The color of each painting was different—the vivacity of colors and tone, the distinctness of each part in relation to the whole; and each picture would have been recognized anywhere as a specimen of work by each one of us, characteristic of our names. And we spent on the whole affair perhaps twenty minutes. I wish you to understand again that we each thought and felt as though we had been photographing the matter before us. We had not the first desire of expressing ourselves, and I think would have been very much worried had we not felt that each one was true to nature. Of course there is no absolute nature, as with each slight shifting of the eye, involuntarily we focus more or less distinctly some part to the prejudice of others. And not only would this result have been the same if we had gone on painting, but had we made a drawing, had we made a careful representation or rapid note of what we saw by lines (that is to say, by an abstraction of the edges of the surfaces that we saw), anyone could have told the names of the men who had done it.”