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
in some other material, so that other people can see it too.

It seems strange that at one time the beauty of natural landscape was
hardly perceived by any one at all. People lived in the beautiful
country and scarcely knew that it was beautiful. Then came the time
when the beauty of landscape began to be felt by the nicest people.
They began to put it into their poetry, and to talk and write about
it, and to display it in landscape pictures. It was through poems and
pictures, which they read and saw, that the general run of folks first
learned to look for beauty in nature. I have no doubt that Turner's
wonderful sunsets made plenty of people look at sunsets and rejoice
in the intricacy and splendour of their glory for the first time in
their lives. Well, what Turner and other painters of his generation
did for landscape, had had to be done for men and women in earlier
days by earlier generations of artists. The Greeks were the first,
in their sculpture, to show the wonderful beauty of the human form;
till their day people had not recognised what to us now seems obvious.
No doubt they had thought one person pretty and another handsome, but
they had not known that the human figure was essentially a glorious
thing till the Greek sculptors showed them. Another thing painters
have taught the world is the beauty of atmosphere. Formerly no one
seems to have noticed how atmosphere affects every object that is seen
through it. The painters had to show us that it is so. After we had
seen the effect of atmosphere in pictures we began to be able to see
for ourselves in nature, and thus a whole group of new pleasures in
views of nature was opened up to us.

Away back in the Middle Ages, six hundred and more years ago, folks
had far less educated eyes than we possess to-day. They looked at nature
more simply than we do and saw less in it. So they were satisfied with
pictures that omitted a great many features we cannot do without.

But painting does not only concern itself with representing the world
we actually see and the people that our eyes actually behold. It
concerns itself quite as much with the world of fancy, of make-believe.
Indeed, most painters when they look at an actual scene let their fancy
play about it, so that presently what they see and what they fancy
get mixed up together, and their pictures are a mixture of fancy and
of fact, and no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins.
The fancies of people are very different at different times, and you
can't understand the pictures of old days unless you can share the
fancies of the old painters. To do that you must know something about
the way they lived and the things they believed, and what they hoped
for and what they were afraid of.

Here, for instance, is a very funny fact solemnly recorded in an old
account book. A certain Count of Savoy owned the beautiful Castle of
Chillon, which you have perhaps seen, on the shores of the Lake of
Geneva. But he could not be happy, because he and the people about
him thought that in a hole in the rock under one of the cellars a
basilisk lived--a very terrible dragon--and they all went in fear of
it. So the Count paid a brave mason a large sum of money (and the payment
is solemnly set down in his account book) to break a way into this
hole and turn the basilisk out; and I have no doubt that he and his
people were greatly pleased when the hole was made and no basilisk
was found. Folks who believed in dragons as sincerely as that, must
have gone in terror in many places where we should go with no particular
emotion. A picture of a dragon to them would mean much more than it
would to us. So if we are really to understand old pictures, we must
begin by understanding the fancies of the artists who painted them,
and of the people they were painted for. You see how much study that
means for any one who wants to understand all the art of all the world.

We shall not pretend to lead you on any such great quest as that, but
ask you to look at just a few old pictures that have been found charming
by a great many people of several generations, and to try and see
whether they do not charm you as well. You must never, of course,
pretend to like what you don't like--that is too silly. We can't all
like the same things. Still there are certain pictures that most nice
people like. A few of these we have selected to be reproduced in this
book for you to look at. And to help you realize who painted them and
the kind of people they were painted for, my daughter has written the
chapters that follow. I hope you will find them entertaining, and still
more that you will like the pictures, and so learn to enjoy the many
others that have come down to us from the past, and are among the world's
most precious possessions to-day.




CHAPTER II

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY IN EUROPE


Before we give our whole attention to the first picture, of which the
original was painted in England in 1377, let us imagine ourselves in
the year 1200 making a rapid tour through the chief countries of Europe
to see for ourselves how the people lived. The first thing that will
strike us on our journey is the contrast between the grandeur of the
churches and public buildings and the insignificance of most of the
houses. Some of the finest churches in England, built in the style
of architecture called 'Norman,' one or more of which you may have
seen, date before the year 1200, as for example, Durham Cathedral,
and the naves of Norwich, Ely, and Peterborough Cathedrals. The great
churches abroad were also beautiful and more elaborately decorated,