ROBisoN] NATURE-STUDY IN ART 209 



An Easter card or other article bearing the sentiment, "Consider 

 the HHes, how they grow, etc.," would be grotesquely illustrated by 

 a drawing of flowers with five petals. By being generalized or 

 slurred over, the number of flower parts may not necessarily be 

 evident. Even though not showing the characteristic three and 

 multiples thereof, the design shoiild avoid the appearance of the 

 four plan, found mostly in the mustard family, or the number five, 

 shown by most blossoming plants with net-veined leaves. Art 

 teachers in schools have been known to show little concern over a 

 six-petalled rose, though they would be horrified by one that was 

 blue. Just recall how faithful the fleur-de-lis figure is to its most 

 commonly accepted prototype, the iris, even bending over back- 

 ward in its conscientiousness about the color. Though we do have 

 yellow irises, who ever saw a yellow fleur-de-lis? The number 

 three is as characteristic of the lily and its allies as it is of the num- 

 ber of pairs of insect legs. To one who knows better, it is as absurd 

 to illustrate the jingle, "Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuifet," with a 

 six-legged spider as it would seem to one at all acquainted with 

 history to find a picture of Julius Caesar wearing a silk hat. An 

 indistinguishable tangle of spider legs, at least, does not tell an 

 untruth. The defense for some of these biological monstrosities is 

 "proper spacing," "harmony," and other similar reasons. Since 

 we cannot easily crowd the leaf of a Virginia creeper into a triangle 

 without mangling it, why not substitute poison ivy? If the design 

 be square, we might find suggestions from the unusual form of the 

 tulip tree, the yellow poplar of commerce. The same protest 

 applies equally to color, but here we find the art people keen 

 enough to insure little violation of any one's sensibilities, except as 

 styles change. After all the amount of conformity to nature is a 

 matter of the generality of experience, just as no one would ever 

 think of painting a sky green. 



The mention of sky leads to another point of contact between 

 nature and art work in school, especially in the primary grades. 

 It was true once, let us hope it is true no longer, that the first 

 exercises in applying water colors were just that, exercises, in the 

 same sense that the term, manual training, as applied to woodwork 

 once called up memories of such unapplied exercises as sawing off 

 ends of boards, planing with no final product but shavings, making 

 various kinds of joints that were never destined to be parts of an 

 object desirable in itself. The simplest landscape we can imagine 

 is of only two tints within a rectangle, the upper part representing 



