Outdoor Sketching

A white umbrella, a three-legged stool and a changing landscape supply the working studio in Francis Hopkinson Smith's four talks on outdoor art. Given before the Art Institute of Chicago in 1914, these illustrated lectures cover composition, mass, watercolors and charcoal. Smith writes from his experience of completing pictures on location, describing the excitement of catching a particular light or matching the color of a leaf before the scene changes.

His examples move from a quiet meadow beside a stream to the architecture of Constantinople and the reflections in a Venetian canal. Practical discussion sits alongside an argument for leaving room for the viewer's imagination, rather than crowding a picture with small details. In the watercolor lecture, he finds models for color harmony in autumn foliage, morning skies, rocks and tree trunks. Readers interested in landscape drawing can follow both his habits of observation and his ideas about how an artist communicates beauty.