GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



crimson variety, dear to the ordinary gardener's heart. Behind 

 them lay a stretch of meadow-land, yellow with buttercups, shut 

 in by a belt of trees, barely in leaf, and empurpled by distance. 

 It was all so crude in colour that, except in the early morning, 

 when the newly risen sun behind them, merely catching the edges 

 of the crimson May, threw its masses into broad, purplish shadow, 

 I had little pleasure in looking out, for the violent contrast jarred. 

 But towards evening, when the sun having travelled round to the 

 back of the house, poured a flood of all-embracing amber light 

 over the entire scene, fusing and harmonizing the fiery elements 

 that were before at war, changing the fierce crimson of the May- 

 flower into orange, and warming into " old gold " the yellow of 

 the meadow in which the hay grass was beginning to turn colour 

 the effect was superb, though singular and unconventional. 



It is the painter's mission to reveal facts in their environment 

 that the majority of people do not see them for themselves. Their 

 senses are not keenly alive to pleasure or pain, and they pass by 

 half the loveliest things in Nature, and would resent, or at best not 

 heed, a verbal demonstration. I once remarked to a friend upon 

 some unfortunate arrangement in a garden, due to insensitiveness 

 to colour -discords. He shrugged his shoulders, regarded me 

 compassionately, and said : " How thankful I am I am not an 

 artist ! ' : The obvious answer to this, though I did not give it, 

 was : "If we suffer much that you do not suffer, we enjoy more ! ' 

 On the other hand, there are people who may feel, but who are 

 inarticulate ; unable to convey in words what they see, or to 

 make others see it too ; and it is our business as painters, to explain 

 and interpret Nature for them, because : 



" We love first, first when we see them painted 

 Things we have seen a hundred times 



Nor cared to see 



Art was given for that God uses us to help each other so 

 Sending our minds out." 



I would that the first and greatest of all Impressionist painters, 

 Turner, could return to life and reconstruct for us, the vision of the 

 Lake of Lucerne as he must have seen it, and as once I, too, saw it, 

 many, many years ago ; when, opening my hotel window the 

 morning after my arrival, I looked forth, and beheld for the first 



222 



