Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/188

LANDSCAPE PAINTING nature as the Americans see it. There is no art so synthetic, so conventional, that it does not derive from nature, and the difference between the art of Persia and the art of Europe is the mental and temperamental difference between the Persian and the European. This is the foundation and explanation of all art, whatever period it represents, or from whatever country it emanates, and it applies with equal force to the decoration on a porcelain jug or to the greatest mural painting in the world. Sincerity! Sincerity! that is the key to it all. Of course it was comparatively easy for the Hindoo or the Japanese or the Persian to be sincere and naïve because the arts of other countries were unknown to them. But our wider knowledge is no handicap, no disadvantage [144]