I know little of pictures. I have had, in my judgement of them, one rule only. It was this: Did I feel just the same before the landscape on, and the same landscape off the canvas? Did the sun's shining, or the water's gleam, or the mountain's gloom, or the soft haze enwrapping all, say to me just what they say to me painted by no brush but that of God. If they did, then I said the picture must have been painted by an artist, one who cared for form only as a means of expression; who felt behind the form the thought, and who through the form conveyed the thought to me.
I remember standing before impossible or rather improbable pictures—"There never could have been anything like that in Nature," people said. Ah, but I knew there could, because something in me recognized and responded to it. Something that I held to be a far more infallible guide than any human judgment or petty range of experience of mine.
The unfamiliar and the familiar in scenery might stand side by side in two different frames, and yet if one were painted by the true artist, and the other by one who knew form only as form, then it would be the unfamiliar that would seem as if I had always known it, and the other that would be strange and unmeaning.
