Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/58

LANDSCAPE PAINTING in which we know it. There were indeed many landscape painters among the older masters—Ruysdael and Cuyp, Hobbema, Salvator Rosa, Claude, and even Rembrandt on occasion. But, owing to a curious psychological phenomenon, none of these men were able to see straight out of their eyes once they were in the open air. They painted landscape, but landscape in which the fields and the hills and the trees bore no relation to the skies that overhung them, in which the shadows were warmer in color than the lights, in which browns took the place of violets, and in which (owing to ignorance of the laws of vibration) the surface of the canvas never entirely disappeared from view. As I have previously stated, the dawn of the new movement was seen in England, when Constable and his confreres carried their easels into the open, and [32]