This is perhaps reducing theories of painting to a very elementary basis. The formula prescribes merely an omission of what you do not care for and a strong characterization of the things you do care for. But as a matter of fact is that not the process common to most painters? The Meissoniers and Gérômes who paint the shoe-button and the eyelash do so because they love shoe-buttons and eyelashes just as Durand and Church loved birch bark and trailing ivy. Almost all of our early landscapists made no discrimination whatever in what they liked or disliked. A red sun in the background was of no more artistic importance than a red September maple in the foreground. They took nature in its entirety, omitting nothing, adding nothing. In result they produced something only a grade above the colored photograph. But Corot, Inness, Wyant, Martin had a more intelligent view-point. To them there were certain features of nature that were characteristic in their universality and permanence, and other features that were merely casual or accidental. The introduction of the merely casual they found did not lend to the characterization of the permanent, so they discarded it and threw their strength into that which signified the most. What are the significant and permanent features in landscape? Well, above all is light--the first of created things, and to this latest day the most beautiful of nature’s manifestations. Corot spent his life painting it and even on his deathbed was raving about it in delirium. No wonder Martin was a great admirer of Corot, for he, too, was devoted to the splendor of light. In all of his later pictures it is a leading feature, and the eye is inevitably drawn at once to this beauty of the sky. He greatly disliked anything like a story in his landscapes or any literary climax dependent upon figures or houses or animals. They would detract from the tale of light and were discarded. Nature was beautiful enough by itself considered. No wonder he chose the uninhabited mountains for his subjects. They were not only devoid of humanity, but up there beyond the peaks was the most splendid manifestation of the light he loved--the pure mountain light.