Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/174

LANDSCAPE PAINTING to accomplish even this much, he must know well the work of his predecessors. If by some dreadful catastrophe all the art of the world should suddenly be destroyed and all knowledge of it blotted from the minds of the survivors, it would require ten thousand years for humanity to recover the lost ground. As an artist is dependent upon the past, it is evident that he must strive to see and to study all of the past art that he can find—to feed his mind constantly upon it. In the old days when the painter was a craftsman—a little higher than the workers in iron or in brass, in wood, or in the precious metals, but still in the same category—it was customary to apprentice lads to some well-known master. Velasquez was thus apprenticed at the age of thirteen, Perugino at nine, and Andrea del Sarto at the tender age of seven. Constantly under the master's [132]