..photography does not as yet render certain qualities of natural scenery with actual truthfulness. Air, light and space have yet to be secured in their integrity. The all important quality called tone, although sometimes seen in the best works of our very best photographic artists is, as a rule, also absent from our productions.
But the art is in its infancy, and, considering its present aspect in connection with its present age, we must indeed be poor, sickly desponding advocates if we are not full of strong hopes and hale, high-soaring aspirations.
Has painting no disadvantages? Ask the poor enthusiast, sitting with his palette and colours under the mighty dome of Nature's own academy, and scramblingly striving to imitate this glorious effect of colour, or that glorious mass of clout form ...
But despite these mighty difficulties the painter's and the sculptor's arts are not degraded from their high estate. Such defects, it is well known, are overcome by the talent and experience of artists in both branches. And photography's defects are also overcome by the talents and experience of photographers ..
... photographers have their difficulties. and for every one that succeeds in producing genuine artistic pictures we have hundreds, nay thousands, who never soar above the lowest level of mediocrity. It is the same in painting: thousands can use brushes and colours with tolerable manipulative skill who never yet produced a picture, and never will.