PREFACE 



lovers of art in helping towards that truer observation 

 of nature which is a result and justification, if not an 

 aim, of painting. They do not attempt to deal with 

 higher aesthetic problems ; their intention will be ful- 

 filled if they lead to a more sympathetic contact between 

 the reader and the painter. 



My own experience in accompanying artistically 

 untrained people round the National Gallery has 

 been that it is often the loving painting of nature, of 

 flower, animal, or bird — for example, Titian's Bacchus 

 and Ariadne, or Giovanni Bellini's Peter Martyr — 

 which first makes this contact. When it is once made, 

 the painter has his chance of saying what is in his 

 mind with some hope of response. "It takes two to 

 speak truth," says Thoreau, "one to speak and another 

 to hear," and the same principle applies in the case 

 of truth pictorially presented. 



Many of the descriptions of pictures in current 

 books, even in those by competent critics, are strangely 

 inaccurate when they come to deal with che life of 

 nature depicted in them, I can hardly hope that in 

 attempting to cover so wide a field I have myself in 

 every case interpreted the painter aright. I have 

 generally backed my own judgment, but I have to 

 thank Dr. Sherwill Dawe for reading the MS. and 

 for the benefit of his knowledge and advice in several 



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