Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/270

LANDSCAPE PAINTING —the axe poised in mid-air ready for its downward sweep, or the stroke completed in the heart of the tree—the lifting wave poised for the fall, or the breaker that has crashed to its turbulent end upon the beach. Shortly also, it began to be seen that the marine painter who depended upon the kodak for his drawing, lost all sense of motion in the waves, that the wind-blown drapery of a photograph was nearly as rigid as a sheet of crumpled tin; that the impression, in fact, which the eye received from nature was not that which was rendered by the camera; and that, therefore, the human brain could never accept the photograph as a thoroughly satisfactory transcript of nature.

It is to be feared that the hopes which are at present being built upon color-photography are doomed to like disappointment—for the simple reason that [210]