Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/70

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LANDSCAPE PAINTING

everywhere, but she never deals in broken values. The color dances, but the values "stay put."

As to the general tint of color of the undertone no rule can be given, for it can never in any two pictures be alike. It will vary infinitely, according to the effect to be painted, and also according to the temperament of the artist. There would seem to be only two rules that cannot be broken: first the undertone must be warmer than the overtone, and second it must never be brown; and this for the excellent reason that out-of-door nature abhors brown, and never uses it. Even the house-painter's most venomous effort in this direction is generally met by kindly and all-forgiving mother nature with some gray reflection from the sky to mitigate its worst virulence. The one weak spot in the technical armor of the Barbizon painters was

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