Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/204

LANDSCAPE PAINTING hills, of rivers and surging seas. Its soul is the spirit of light—of sunlight, of moonlight, of starlight—which plays ceaselessly across the face of the landscape, veiling it at night in mystery and shadow, painting it at dawn with the colors of the pearl-shell, and bathing it at mid-day in a luminous glory. To this and to the ambient and all-enveloping atmosphere, with its clouds and its mists, its rain and its veiling haze, are due the infinite and ever-shifting moods of nature. He who paints the body alone may be an excellent craftsman, but the true artist is he who paints the beautiful body informed and irradiated by the still more lovely and fascinating spirit—he who renders the mood. The painter who lacks this greatest of all gifts, or who, having it, fails to use it, might just as well scrape his [156]