C.141.dd.8(39)

Genre: Landscape Photography

View looking across marshy ground towards a group of thatched cottages. Here, 'much interesting and paintable material comes very happily together. Variety is added by a patch of gorse to a soft grassy foreground, already broken by the water, which takes the eye into the picture by two ways — one straight up the dike under the dark hawthorns, the other gracefully curving. Against the sky the beautiful silhouette of the group of cottages tells sharply, in pleasing contrast to the softer outlines of the trees. The light just catches the roadway winding past the houses to where the distant marshes form a straight horizon. broken only by a few wisps of trees. These two subjects [plates 38 and 39] serve well to illustrate how unnecessary it is to alter the natural arrangement of things to make a picture. Although they are literal transcripts, it is hard to find a line in them which could be altered with advantage. The designs presented by nature, ready made, always interest us far more than the artificial compositions of painters who pick and choose, arrange and alter, the material around them in constructing their pictures...'