=Out-of-door Landscapes.=--The most important movement in modern art, the most important in its effects on all kinds of work, is what I have mentioned as the _plein air_ movement. It was thought by some clear-headed men that the best way to paint an out-door picture was to take their canvases out-of-doors to paint it. Instead of working from a few color sketches and many pencil studies, they painted the whole picture from first to last in the open air. Working in this way, certain qualities got into the pictures unavoidably. Necessarily the color was fresher and truer. Necessarily there was more breadth and frankness, and less conventionality and mere picture-making. The spirit of the open got onto the canvas, and the whole type of picture was changed. For the first time out-of-door values were studied as things in themselves interesting and important. The result on landscape pictures was that pictures painted in the studio seemed unreal and insincere, and that men looked and studied less for the making of pictures, and more for what nature had to reveal.
It would be a good thing for you as a student if you would do as these men did whenever you want to do any work at landscape, whether for itself, or for background. If you wish to pose any kind of figure with landscape background, pose and paint your figure out-of-doors. Make sketches as much as you please, make studies as much as you please; but make them for the suggestions and knowledge they will give you, and not for material to be used in painting a picture at home. For your picture, start, and go on with, and finish it out-doors; you will get a feeling of freshness and truth in your work which you cannot get any other way. You will also acquire a power of concentration and of selection and rejection in the presence of nature which is of the utmost importance to you.
=Impressionism.=--It is not possible to speak of landscape and _plein air_ without mention of the "Impressionists." You should understand what "impressionism" really is, and what it is not, and what the impressionist stands for. Whether we like it or not, this work is not to be ignored. It has tried for certain things, and has shown that they can be much more justly represented than had before been believed to be possible, and fad or no fad, that result stands.