Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/219

THE SUB-CONSCIOUS SERVANT was helpful to me in many ways and gave me much good advice. I was in his studio one day, a month or so after his return from a trip in Holland. He placed upon the easel one after another eight finished pictures and showed me a dozen canvases rubbed in with the warm gray which he preferred for an undertone. "Those also are finished," he said; "all that remains is to put on the color." Each picture represented a different time of day, the effects varying from high noon to midnight. The motives had been stored carefully in the memory and the pictures all painted after the master's return to Paris.

It was a marvellous feat to have carried all these varying effects simultaneously in the mind without confusion, and I did not dissimulate my astonishment.

"Well, mon ami," he said, "I [169]