Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/60

LANDSCAPE PAINTING and dale, on rock and tree, so long as light endured there must also be the rainbow attenuated and diminished in power, it is true, but with its three primary and prismatic colors, locking and interlocking, shifting and shimmering and playing across one another in an iridescent dance of color that was, or should be, always clearly visible to the eye of the trained artist. And as they saw nature so these men painted their pictures, laying the pure pigments side by side upon the canvas in strokes and dots or dashes of red and yellow and blue which, seen at the proper distance, were supposed to fuse into the desired tones and masses, while at the same time retaining a luminous quality of their own never before seen upon canvas. I can remember the first exhibition which these men gave in Paris in the [34]