I am very doubtful how far people do not arrange their light and
shade too much with the result with which we are familiar in drawing-
masters' copies; it may be right or it may not, I don't know--I am
afraid I ought to know, but I don't; but I do know that those
pictures please me best which were painted without the slightest
regard to any of these rules.
I suppose the justification of those who talk as above lies in the
fact that, as we cannot give all nature, we lie by suppressio veri
whether we like it or no, and that you sometimes lie less by putting
in something which does not exist at the moment, but which easily
might exist and which gives a lot of facts which you otherwise could
not give at all, than by giving so much as you can alone give if you
adhere rigidly to the facts. If this is so the young painter would
understand the matter, if it were thus explained to him, better than
he is likely to do if he is merely given it as a canon.
At the same time, I admit it to be true that one never sees light but
it has got dark in it, nor vice versa, and that this comes to saying
that if you are to be true to nature you must break your lights into
your shadows and vice versa; and so usual is this that, if there
happens here or there to be an exception, the painter had better say
nothing about it, for it is more true to nature's general practice
not to have it so than to have it.
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