Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/288

LANDSCAPE PAINTING charm us by their talent have done nothing throughout the ages but reproduce nature. They copy as closely as ever they can the most beautiful, the most admirable, the most perfect thing in the world—which is nature."

This does not mean, however, that an artist must necessarily be a mere machine, that he has no intellectual liberty of choice in regard to what he shall represent and how he shall represent it. Art includes every object of intrinsic beauty that was ever created by human hands. The Turkish rug, the Chinese keramic, the Moorish carving, the Japanese color-print and the Gothic cathedral are just as truly art in the highest sense as the Greek marble or the modern painting. But there are certain limits beyond which an artist may not step, and all art which has attained to greatness has been the sincere expression, [226]