view, or some detail in a face far more emphatically than others. Girls
are quicker to take note of the colour of eyes, hair, skin, clothes,
and so forth than boys. A woman who merely sees another woman for a
moment will be able to describe her and her dress far more accurately
than a man. A man will be noticing other things. His picture, if he
painted one, would make those other things prominent.

So it is with everything that we see. None of us sees more than certain
features in what the eye rests upon, and if we are artists it is only
those features that we should paint. We can't possibly paint every
detail of everything that comes into the picture. We must make a choice,
and of course we choose the features and details that please us best.
Now, the purpose of painting anything at all is to paint the beauty
of the thing. If you see something that strikes you as ugly, you don't
instinctively want to paint it; but when you see an effect of beauty,
you feel that it would be very nice indeed to have a picture showing
that beauty. So a picture is not really the representation of a thing,
but the representation of the beauty of the thing.

Some people can see beauty almost everywhere; they are conscious of
beauty all day long. They want to surround themselves with beauty,
to make all their acts beautiful, to shed beauty all about them. Those
are the really artistic souls. The gift of such perfect instinct for
beauty comes by nature to a few. It can be cultivated by almost all.
That cultivation of all sorts of beauty in life is what many people
call civilization--the real art of living. To see beauty everywhere
in nature is not so very difficult. It is all about us where the work
of uncivilized man has not come in to destroy it. Artists are people
who by nature and by education have acquired the power to see beauty
in what they look at, and then to set it down on paper or canvas, or