Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/319

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ART her exquisite and ever-varying effects—that happen because of the change from night to day and from day to night again—are spread out always before us, an endless feast of beauty for those who have eyes to see and minds to appreciate. Nevertheless, it is quite possible that, in the very changed conditions of our civilization, there may lurk wonderful and hitherto unsuspected opportunities for our future artists, and especially our figure-painters. There is certainly a strange picturesqueness in some of our modern steel mills, with their cyclopean forces at work against backgrounds of whirling steam and glowing furnace. Even our sky-scrapers have an unusual beauty of their own, and the sky-line of lower New York is far from being ugly or uninteresting. Another field that is replete with possibilities is the teeming [251]