Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/138

LANDSCAPE PAINTING decides its value, and neither the size of the canvas nor the character of the subject counts. A portrait by Velasquez, a landscape by Corot, or a tiny still-life by Chardin may very well be worth a dozen great figure compositions by Le Brun or Van Loo. To withhold praise therefore from one of the bewilderingly beautiful pipe-dreams of Monticelli would be to deny the value of all the decorative art in the world; to say that the mere sensuous beauty of the flower or of the peacock's feather has no value because it delivers no intellectual message; to brush aside as worthless the keramic art of Japan, the textiles of Persia, and the cathedral glass of the Middle Ages. But just as we should deprecate the presence of a precious surface quality in one of Millet's noble and homely canvases, so we should resent any attempt [102]