May Foliage. 153 



large enough, and shapely enough, to require careful 

 drawing, an artist does not wish them to be too nu- 

 merous ; thus, there is no work that can be offered to 

 a figure-painter more distasteful to his artistic feeling 

 than a crowd of a hundred faces, of which every one 

 must be a portrait, since the mere attention to indi- 

 viduality imperils the unity of the whole work. On the 

 other hand, if the numbers are very great the painter 

 likes them to be far past any possibility of counting, so 

 that his only duty may be to represent the mystery 

 and infinity of the innumerable. Thus, in leaf-drawing, 

 the greatest figure-painters have always designed a few 

 leaves of the kinds whose forms are beautiful, both 

 pleasurably and successfully, and such a thing as a 

 wreath of laurel is perfectly agreeable to their taste ; 

 whilst, on the other hand, the great landscape-painters 

 have delighted in the immensity of foliage, where the 

 leaf is nothing individually and only the mass is seen. 

 The objection to the horse-chestnut is, that to render it 

 perfectly we should need the skill of the figure-painter 

 drawing a wreath of laurel, and the skill of the land- 

 scape-painter sketching the masses of a forest. The 

 leaves are so large, and so peculiar in their form, that 

 they cannot be treated negligently, for the negligent 

 hand would commit errors in shape and scale that the 

 first comer would at once detect ; yet, at the same time, 

 they are so numerous, that any attempt to draw them 

 individually, as you would the twin-leaves of the lily of 

 the valley, must inevitably spoil the unity of the tree, 

 not to speak of the still vaster unity of a picture. The 



