Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/290

LANDSCAPE PAINTING moods. Surely in this wide field there remains to us a sufficient latitude of choice both as regards the subjects we shall paint and the manner in which we shall render our impressions. It is always open to us to choose our direction. In each of us there is a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde, and in art as in life it depends on ourselves which shall rule.

When I was a student in Paris away back in the seventies, a group of young artists who were at that time making some stir in the art world asserted with a great deal of unnecessary noise and bluster that good painting could glorify the most revolting subject. The subject was nothing, the craftsmanship everything. I remember that I was temporarily caught up in the swirl of the movement and that for a time I ran with the shouting iconoclasts; and the memory of this makes me still [228]