This goes so far that one might even be deceived into thinking that the
different ages had gazed upon the beauty of nature not only with
differing mental eyes but also with a different faculty of seeing. Most
of the old masters have painted their landscapes with the eyes of a
far-sighted person; we think, as a rule, that we can attain far greater
natural truth if we paint our pictures, as it were, from the angle of
vision of a near-sighted person. A far-sighted painter will usually be
more inclined to paint a plastic landscape, while a near-sighted one
would make a mood-picture out of the same scene. The very trees of the
old Italians, on which the leaves are numbered, may serve to exemplify
this comparison. The scenery of the landscapes of Van Eyck and his
pupils is quite often painted as though the artist had looked at the
background through a perspective glass and the foreground through a
magnifying one. Jan Breughel paints his charming little landscapes with
such detailed precision of outline, especially as regards foliage, he
draws in his swarming little figures with such sharp lines, that the
whole seems reflected in the eye of an eagle rather than in that of a
man. On the other hand we miss the unity and the differentiation of the
combined effect--the concentration of large groups, an eye for the
landscape as an organic whole. Claude Lorraine and Ruysdael are the
first who may be called epoch-making along these lines; they are also,
in this sense, the ancestors of modern landscape painting.
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