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The geometrical open fillings of leaves and backgrounds are often composed of lines of thread thrown across and couched down at regular intervals. Embroidery stitches can be made use of for couching down other threads; a bunch of threads may be laid upon the material, and an open chain, buttonhole, or feather stitch worked over in order to fix it in place.

A few people are intimately engaged, and the others are bystanders, or onlookers. One characteristic is that many of these last are portraits of Florentine men and women who were his contemporaries, and so we get from his pictures a knowledge of the people and costumes of his time. His backgrounds are often masses of Florentine architecture, some of which you will readily recognize.

We formerly had the shadowed backgrounds of the universe to populate with the creatures of our fear or fancy, but now, strangely enough, since science has let in its light upon the universe psychology has given us the subconscious as a region not yet subdued to law or shot through with light. And the prophets of new cults and border-land movements have taken advantage of this.

I will also grant that Zola is a master of backgrounds and masses and that his tricky handling of people is unequalled. Then, too, thank God, he has never followed out, in his novels, the theories enunciated in his magazine articles, adulating the intrusion of positivism upon art.

A sullen, muddy, half-drowned Japan. All these houses, men, and beasts, hitherto known to me only in drawings; all these, that I had beheld painted on blue or pink backgrounds of fans or vases, now appeared to me in their hard reality, under a dark sky, with umbrellas and wooden shoes, with tucked-up skirts and pitiful aspect.

Few backgrounds have been more subtly rendered in their influence upon character, and the action of the story is inevitable despite its character of surprise. The brutal realism of this story may repel the reader, but its power and convincing quality cannot be gainsaid.

Pinkish-Red-Gold, used in the flag poles and lighting standards only. It is a very brilliant and striking pigment, and is always topped with gold. Wall-Red, used in three tones. They are found in the backgrounds of the colonnades, courts and niches, on the tiled roofs, and in the statuary. These reds run from terra-cotta to a deep russet, and predominate in the interiors of the principal courts.

At the Institute there are several rooms hung with early productions of the Sienese school, painted before the invention of oil-colors, on wood shaped into Gothic altar-pieces. The backgrounds still retain a bedimmed splendor of gilding. There is a plentiful use of red, and I can conceive that the pictures must have shed an illumination through the churches where they were displayed.

Rembrandt's influence upon the art of his time was very great almost from the beginning of his career. About 1634 he introduced his manner of portrait-painting, with dark backgrounds and deep shadows on the face, with a bright light on the cheek and nose passing down to the shoulder, and immediately other artists adopted this manner.

He always has a story to tell, tells it with the skill which means constructive development and a sense of situation; he creates characters who live, interest and do not easily fade from memory: he has exceptional power in so filling in backgrounds as to produce the illusion of atmosphere; and finally, he has, whether in dialogue or description, a wonderfully supple instrument of expression.