Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/228

LANDSCAPE PAINTING especially to the painter of in-door subjects, who can control his effect and can place his model day after day in the same light, the advantage of memory painting may not be so apparent; yet even here I maintain that its more frequent use would be of greater advantage than is appreciated at the first blush; and this because the psychology of art is universal in its application, and true synthetic beauty is not within the reach of the mere copyist—be he ever so brilliant a workman.

It is said that Rembrandt often worked upon his pictures from memory, and report has it that Velasquez preferred to paint with his sitter in the next room. In regard to the greatest of all modern figure painters, and one of the greatest of all times, Jean François Millet, we have living witnesses to the fact that he never worked from nature. [176]