The best of all means for acquiring _art sense_ is association; first, with a personality; second, with the product. The artist’s safest method with the uninitiated is to use the speech which they understand. In conversation, artists, as a rule, talk freely, and one may get deeper into art from a fortnight’s sojourn with a group of artists than from all the treatises ever written on the philosophy of art. The most successful collectors of pictures know this. They study artists as well as pictures. But on the other hand must it not also be conceded that acquaintance with fine examples of art is in a fair way of cultivating the keen and intelligent collector in the pictorial sense to a degree beyond that of those artists whose associations are altogether with their own works or with those who think with them, who must of necessity believe most sincerely in themselves and who are thus obliged to operate in a groove, and with consequent bias. For this reason association should be varied. No one has the whole truth.
Music scores a point beyond painting, in necessitating a personality. We see the interpreter and this intimacy assists comprehension. But howsoever potent is association with art and artist, one may thus never get as closely in touch with art as by working with her. The best and safest critic is of course one who has performed. Experts are those persons who have passed through every branch and know the entire “business.”
The years of toil to students who eventually never arrive are incidentally spent in gaining the knowledge to thus know pictures, and though the success of accomplishment be denied, their compensation lies in the lengthened reach of a new horizon which meantime has been opened to them. Whether the picture be found in nature and is to be rescued, as is the bas-relief from its enveloping mould, cut out of its surroundings by the four sides of the canvas and brought indoors with the same glow of triumph as the geologist feels in picking a turquoise out of a rock at which others had stared and found nothing; or whether it be found, as one of many in a collection of prints or paintings; or whether the recognition be personal and asks the acceptance of something wrought by one’s own hand—to know a picture when one sees it—this is art _sense._ Backed by a judgment presenting a defense to the protests of criticism, it becomes art _knowledge._