Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/166

LANDSCAPE PAINTING of my shells and nets and weeds, although gilded, were actual objects, with which the eye was familiar. The observer as a consequence saw the frame when it was essential that he should see only the picture. The frame, I perceived at last, must be something midway between the real and the unreal—conventional in form and intangible in surface. And I re-discovered the fact, which the old masters had discovered so many centuries ago, that there was no material in the whole range of nature so admirably fitted for the surface of a frame as gold or metal leaf. Next to the mirror, it presents the most elusive of all surfaces. Semi-reflecting, semi-solid, it is just the thing that fills all the requirements. So I came back home again and spent the rest of my time in a study of the best forms and the best tones of metal leaf to be [126]