A. From pictures in Oratorio di S. Ansano.  “Il trionfo dell’ Amore,” attributed to Botticelli.

B. From “L’Annunziazione,” by Botticelli, Uffizi, Florence.

C. From “La Vergine,” by Giovanni Bellini in the Accademia, Venice.]

Corot in his later work developed a treatment that has been largely followed since.  Looking at trees with a very wide focus, he ignored individual leaves, and resolved them into masses of tone, here lost and here found more sharply against the sky.  The subordinate masses of foliage within these main boundaries are treated in the same way, resolved into masses of infinitely varying edges.  This play, this lost-and-foundness at his edges is one of the great distinguishing charms of Corot’s trees.  When they have been painted from this mass point of view, a suggestion of a few leaves here and a bough there may be indicated, coming sharply against the sky, but you will find this basis of tone music, this crescendo and diminuendo throughout all his later work (see illustration, page 215 [Transcribers Note:  Diagram XXVI]).

These are three of the more extreme types of trees to be met with in art, but the variations on these types are very numerous.  Whatever treatment you adopt, the tree must be considered as a whole, and some rhythmic form related to this large impression selected.  And this applies to all forms with serrated edges:  some large order must be found to which the fussiness of the edges must conform.

The subject of edges generally is a very important one, and one much more worried over by a master than by the average student.  It is interesting to note how all the great painters have begun with a hard manner, with edges of little variety, from which they have gradually developed a looser manner, learning to master the difficulties of design that hard contours insist on your facing, and only when this is thoroughly mastered letting themselves develop freely this play on the edges, this looser handling.

For under the freest painting, if it be good, there will be found a bed-rock structure of well-constructed masses and lines.  They may never be insisted on, but their steadying influence will always be felt.  So err in your student work on the side of hardness rather than looseness, if you would discipline yourself to design your work well.  Occasionally only let yourself go at a looser handling.

[Sidenote:  Variety of Gradiation.]

Variety of gradation will naturally be governed largely by the form and light and shade of the objects in your composition.  But while studying the gradations of tone that express form and give the modelling, you should never neglect to keep the mind fixed upon the relation the part you are painting bears to the whole picture.  And nothing should be done that is out of harmony with this large conception.  It is one of the most difficult things to decide the amount of variety and emphasis allowable for the smaller