out and seeming prominent to you, but not, of course, to any one else.  Then there are other differences in the look of the same things to different people which you have perhaps noticed.  Some people are more sensitive to colours than others.  Some are much more sensitive to brightness and shadow.  Some will notice one kind of object in a view, or some detail in a face far more emphatically than others.  Girls are quicker to take note of the colour of eyes, hair, skin, clothes, and so forth than boys.  A woman who merely sees another woman for a moment will be able to describe her and her dress far more accurately than a man.  A man will be noticing other things.  His picture, if he painted one, would make those other things prominent.

So it is with everything that we see.  None of us sees more than certain features in what the eye rests upon, and if we are artists it is only those features that we should paint.  We can’t possibly paint every detail of everything that comes into the picture.  We must make a choice, and of course we choose the features and details that please us best.  Now, the purpose of painting anything at all is to paint the beauty of the thing.  If you see something that strikes you as ugly, you don’t instinctively want to paint it; but when you see an effect of beauty, you feel that it would be very nice indeed to have a picture showing that beauty.  So a picture is not really the representation of a thing, but the representation of the beauty of the thing.

Some people can see beauty almost everywhere; they are conscious of beauty all day long.  They want to surround themselves with beauty, to make all their acts beautiful, to shed beauty all about them.  Those are the really artistic souls.  The gift of such perfect instinct for beauty comes by nature to a few.  It can be cultivated by almost all.  That cultivation of all sorts of beauty in life is what many people call civilization—­the real art of living.  To see beauty everywhere in nature is not so very difficult.  It is all about us where the work of uncivilized man has not come in to destroy it.  Artists are people who by nature and by education have acquired the power to see beauty in what they look at, and then to set it down on paper or canvas, or in some other material, so that other people can see it too.

It seems strange that at one time the beauty of natural landscape was hardly perceived by any one at all.  People lived in the beautiful country and scarcely knew that it was beautiful.  Then came the time when the beauty of landscape began to be felt by the nicest people.  They began to put it into their poetry, and to talk and write about it, and to display it in landscape pictures.  It was through poems and pictures, which they read and saw, that the general run of folks first learned to look for beauty in nature.  I have no doubt that Turner’s wonderful sunsets made plenty of people look at sunsets and rejoice in the intricacy and splendour of their glory for the