art is not nature

I place no value upon literal transcripts from Nature. My general scope is not realistic; all my tendencies are toward idealization. Though, of course, all art must come through Nature, it is my belief that a place, as a place, has no value in itself for the artist only so far as it furnished the material from which to construct a picture. Topography in art is valueless. Art is not nature; an aggregation of ten thousand facts may add nothing to a picture, but be rather the destruction of it. 

Thomas Moran, How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History by Stephen J. Pyne. Penguin Books. 1998. p.88, 89