Note 60 — Chapter VI

I am always afraid to use this word “Composition;” it is so utterly misused in the general parlance respecting art. Nothing is more common than to hear divisions of art into “form, composition, and color,” or “light and shade and composition,” or “sentiment and composition,” or it matters not what else and composition; the speakers in each case attaching a perfectly different meaning to the word, generally an indistinct one, and always a wrong one. Composition is, in plain English, “putting together,” and it means the putting together of lines, of forms, of colors, of shades, or of ideas. Painters compose in color, compose in thought, compose in form, and compose in effect: the word being of use merely in order to express a scientific, disciplined, and inventive arrangement of any of these, instead of a merely natural or accidental one.