TREES IN MODERN PAINTING 259 



But if this is what all true artists do, how 

 did his work differ from that of such men as 

 Cox and De Wint ? I seize here on one 

 particular of difference, in saying that his work 

 is designed, theirs is composed They give 

 the impression of having made the line and 

 mass and colour in an actual scene more 

 agreeable to the eye than it was in nature by 

 means of certain conventional arrangements of 

 them which we feel as a partial modification of 

 the scene. In Cotman's work there is a change 

 that affects every dot and line and lighter 

 or darker patch in the picture. A sense of 

 rhythm, of visible music, binds everything in 

 it into a harmonious whole. The other men 

 seem to have found in nature a suggestion of 

 harmony, upon which they have improved, 

 without making it perfect. Cotman seems 

 with inevitable instinct to have completely 

 transposed the fact into music. If we turn 

 his drawings upside down, and so lose much 

 of the sense of representation of trees, or 

 stream, or whatever else may be the actual 

 things depicted, the rhythmic play of line and 

 mass only becomes the more obvious. Yet it 

 is so done, in his best work, that • the art does 



