COMPOSITION
once asked Mr. Lhermitte, the veteran French master, what he proposed to call an important picture which he had just then completed for the Salon. "I don't know," he replied. "A picture which needs a title should never have been painted. What would you call it yourself?" We had best not poach upon the preserves of the story-teller, because he can always beat us at his own game. No beauty was added to a certain picture of the Cornish coast which I once saw in the Royal Academy, by the fact that it was entitled "Where the Phœnicians came for tin."
"Don't repeat the main line of your picture with another important line parallel to it." If you have a mountain form swinging up to the left, have your clouds swing up to the right; or tend in that direction. If you are painting in a flat country like Holland, and your
[95]
