The question is rather What is the practice of the artist than What ought to be the practice of the artist. When, in some future epoch of thought, these questions about fine art shall be more generally understood by the writers and thinkers than they now are, it may become possible for some Ruskin of the future to preach an acceptable creed as to the proper mission of the artist; but it has not been possible for the Ruskins of the past or of the present to do so, simply because they have failed to understand the conditions under which the artist does his work. There is very little use in exhorting a man to better things until you are able to sympathize with what he is already engaged upon. Now, it requires but a limited observation of artists to ascertain that they are little occupied in narration, in description, in preaching, in devotion, or in jesting; but a very long continued and minute observance of their ways will leave the beholder in the same mind about these, and more and more convinced that artists are chiefly occupied in producing works of art and nothing else. And what are the works of art which they are trying to produce? In the matter of painting, which is our present subject, it is unfortunate that the word _impression_ has been used in a special sense as describing the way of work of a certain special body of painters, because it more accurately described the way in which most painters work than any other single word will suggest it. The object of the landscape-painter is commonly to paint something upon his canvas which will convey to the spectator an impression which he, the landscape-painter, has already received from external nature. That impression may have come upon him during the watches of the night, as he thought about what he had seen by day; or it may have come upon him instantaneously as he faced a piece of hill-side with trees, or a single old tree. Suppose it even to be a sunset sky, with miles of ocean illuminated by the colored fire above; it is with no hope of adequately representing that sea and sky that he sits down to paint, but he proposes to paint an impression which that sea and sky have made upon his sensitive mind, and which he thinks will be interesting when painted. That, then, is the landscape-painter's subject. Not the whole truth, nor even any essential part of the truth, about a hay-stack or a mountain-range, but an interesting artistic impression made upon the artist's mind by the hay-stack or the mountain-range. Here, as in literature, there are nobler subjects and less noble subjects; but here much less than in literature is the nobility of the work of art affected by the nobility of the subject. In two pictures by Homer Martin, one represents the stretch of an Adirondack lake, with mountain and forest and a great wealth of varied cloud-form in the sky above; while the other represents only the ridge of a hill seen from a point so low that