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255 APPENDIX denman ross to john walker, june 4, 1929 In the copy of the letter that Ross sent to Forbes, he added: ‘‘I am giving advice to John Walker, a boy I like very much; advice which is perhaps contrary to yours and Paul’s. I am sending you a copy of a letter that I have just mailed.’’ Dear Mr. Walker: I remember very well my youth and the beginning of my interest in Art. I never ‘‘fought for the impressionists against my teachers’’, as you put it in your letter, and I have never for a moment given up what Professor Norton taught me. I was not an impressionist when I attended his lectures, the lectures in which he gave me his theory of Art; which has been my own theory from that time to this. It was not until 1884, ten years after leaving college that I decided, following Mr. Norton’s advice, to take up the study of art and the practice of drawing and painting as a profession. At that time I had no idea of teaching or of painting as a business. What I wanted was knowledge, understanding, discrimination and judgment. I had property, inherited from my father so I could do what I wanted to do. I went abroad to see and to study the great masterpieces of Art. I began making comparisons and exercising my judgment and I was painting constantly, following the way of John Ruskin. As far as it goes it is a very good way. It was some years after that before I became interested in the theory of the impressionists and in their work. Ruskin’s idea was that we see the realities of Nature and Life and that they may be represented by drawing and painting. The idea of the impressionists is that we see lines and areas of light and color and that were present them by corresponding lines and spots of paint; that objects, people and things are never seen and cannot be painted; which is perfectly true. The results of painting in the impressionist way were unprecedented and wonderful. The correspondence between the facts of vision and the terms of painting (lines and spots of paint) was, possibly, perfect; the subject and the canvas being seen in the same light. I began to buy impressionist paintings and began to produce them myself; not without success. File 1783, Edward W. Forbes Papers, Harvard Art Museum Archives 256 : Appendix In due time, however, I began to have doubts about it all; when I realized that i [sic] was absolutely tied down to the accidents of vision; to what I might see here or there at one time or another and from a single point of view. There was no possibility of eliminations or additions, no possibility of arranging or rearranging my lines and spots; no possibilities in the direction of Design. It came to me with a shock that my visual imagination was useless. To use it was equivalent to lying. The visual imagination which had produced the Art of Asia, the Art of Egypt and Greece, the Art of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, of the eighteenth century and of the first half of the nineteenth; the incomparable art of J.M.W. Turner, for example; was given up for what? For the most exact imitation that has ever been achieved of the facts of vision as they be observed from a single point of view. I have still a very great interest in the painting of the impressionists and I am still painting in that way when I am trying to paint what I see as I see it. There are people like Sargent and Dodge Macknight who have a genius for it. They have done wonderful things in the way of taking a point of view and translating the fact of vision into the terms of painting; but I cannot forget the achievements of the great masters of Antiquity, of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, who, with the love of order and the sense of beauty followed the suggestions of the visual imagination. When it comes to the post-impressionists I have no interest in their theory and no interest in their work. They care nothing for the facts of vision or for the realities of Nature and Life that lie behind them. All they care for are the lines and spots of paint which they use to represent themselves...

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