But Inness was much nearer to Corot than to Meissonier. He loved sentiment more than clever technique, and perhaps as a result left many “swampy” canvases behind him. His studio was filled with them. He used to take them from the floor and work upon them, sometimes half a dozen in a day. He never was “the perfect master of the brush” that we have heard him called, though he was an acceptable, and often a very powerful, technician. He usually began by basing a canvas in a warm gray or a raw umber tint, afterward sketching in with charcoal or pencil the general outline of forms and objects. His pigments at first were thin, and his canvas in its general distribution of masses was little more than stained. Upon that foundation he kept adding stronger notes, glazing his shadows to keep them transparent and push them back, and placing his opaque lights on top of the glaze. In this way he gradually developed the picture, keying up first one part and then another, until finally he drew the whole picture into unity and harmony. It was most interesting to see Inness at work in this keying-up process. He always painted standing, and would walk backward and forward, putting on dabs here and rubs there with great expertness. He was a painter in oils, seldom employing any other medium, and yet he would use on his canvas almost anything that the impulse of the moment told him might prove effective. One day I watched him for fifteen minutes trying to deepen the shadows in a tree with a lead-pencil. The canvas was dry at the time and he did not want to put any more wet paint upon it. As he painted he talked, argued, declaimed, glared at you over the top of his glasses with apparently little embarrassment to himself or detriment to his canvas. Painting he believed he had reduced to a scientific formula, but he kept changing the formula. Rules of procedure, too, he had in abundance, but they also kept shifting. At one time he insisted that a picture should have three planes--the middle plane to contain the centre of interest, the foreground to be a prologue, and the background an epilogue to this central plane. At another time he would spread a half-tone throughout the whole picture, keeping his sky low in key, and upon this neutral ground he would place lights and darks, making them brilliant and sparkling by contrast. Others before him--notably the Fontainebleau-Barbizon men--had worked with similar rules in mind, but Inness was quite original in his application. And he was always moving on to something new and better. Ripley Hitchcock quotes from one of his letters: “I have changed from the time I commenced because I had never completed my art; and as I do not care about being a cake, I shall remain dough, subject to any impression which I am satisfied comes from the region of truth.” What Inness was at the time he commenced may be gathered from another quotation from the same authority: