Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/109

VALUES The lights are distributed in two or three values at most, and nowhere is there any detail. Try to see your day-light effects in the same way, and you will come far nearer the truth than you might think. Personally, I am inclined to hold values to be the most important quality in a picture—and this in spite of the fact that the work must depend for its charm upon the other qualities of color, design, and refraction. But a picture that is good in all these respects being weak and unsound in values, will nevertheless be a poor picture. Values might be compared to the skeleton in a human figure, which depends for its beauty upon the exquisite curves of the rounded limbs, the silken sheen of the hair, and the color of eyes and lips and blushing cheeks. Remove the skeleton, and the whole fabric of beauty falls to earth a [75]