The beauty and charm of its sentiment with the wonder of its strong mental grasp are paralleled by the workmanship displayed. Looking closely at the canvas, one finds it not heavily loaded, but dragged broadly and laid flatly with pigment. The ground has been underbased in warm browns, the shadows kept transparent and distant by glazes, the lights put in with opaque pigments. The handling is very broad if thin, and there has been little or no kneading or emendation or fumbling. It is straightforward flat painting of a masterful kind. And this was done with that late-trained left hand! [Illustration: “Broad, Silent Valley,” by Alexander H. Wyant. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.] As for the drawing, it does not bother with the edges of objects, but concentrates force on the body and bulk--the color mass. Wyant had learned linear drawing with the exactness of a Durand and used it in his early pictures, but he soon outgrew the fancy for photographic detail. It was not effective. And he could give the solidity of a ledge of rock or the lightness of a floating cloud much better with a broader brush. As he grew in art his brush continued to broaden. His work became more sketchy, his brush freer and fuller, and possibly before he died he may have heard his work referred to as “impressionistic”--heaven save the word! The general public usually regards any breadth of brush-work whatever as a sign of impressionism. The term in its present meaning, or lack of meaning, covers a multitude of stupidities. Every one who paints gives an impression because he cannot give anything else. Realism is a misnomer. The real is nature itself, and art is the report about the real made by the painter. If it is a minute report of surface detail that can be seen through a magnifying-glass the public immediately dubs it realistic; if it is a broad report that ignores the surface detail for bulk, mass, and body, it is called impressionistic. But the difference is merely between the smallness and the largeness of the view-point. The great landscapists have usually regarded a tree as more important in its shadow masses and volume than in its leaves, a rock as more impressive in its weight than its veins or stains, a bar of sunlight more striking in its luminosity than in its sharp-cut edges. Seeing and painting that way it is easy to comprehend how they should be set down as impressionists when in a large sense they are making more faithful record than the men who see only the surface glitter. Such men were Corot, Constable, Inness, Wyant, not to mention Manet or Monet.