Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/258

LANDSCAPE PAINTING shall be clearly and strongly stamped with the personality of its maker, so that we may know without asking that a drawing is by Hokusai, or a painting by Velasquez, Whistler, or Winslow Homer. And originality thus expressed is only another word for sincerity. Sincerity used in this sense, however, is far from meaning a slavish or mechanical copy of nature. The highest form of sincerity is truth to the artist's own personal vision of beauty. All true art is the direct result of analysis and synthesis on the part of the artist—whether instinctive, or accomplished with a clear conception of the work to be done. Having analyzed nature's suggestive motive, the artist is at liberty in the synthetic building up of his work to use as many or as few of the elements as his personal sense of beauty tells him will be necessary to [202]