'Study, therefore, the great masters for ever: study nature attentively, but always with those masters in your company; consider them as models which you are to imitate, and, at the same time, as rivals with whom you are to contend;' and you will insensibly come to feel and reason like them, and find taste imperceptibly formed in your own mind.
By the industry of the hand you will acquire good manner, but it is to the industry of the mind you will be indebted for any solid reputation.
'He who does not know others, knows himself very imperfectly.'
Wrongly directed industry is a dangerous delusion. Too much copying will, on the other hand, greatly tend to impair our mental exertions, render them servile and mechanical, and confine, at the most, our aspirings to a very limited sphere, while it is utterly at variance in establishing any claim of our own to originality or distinction. Studying the genius of a fine work of art, its general forms, its combinations, its chiaroscuro, its colour and effect; and with all these on our minds, going home and making a companion to it, is a noble and lofty aim, frequently attended with entire success. This excellent practice, diligently persevered in, at length brings our sympathies into a corresponding train of ideas with those we would emulate; and if we cannot reach them in their various excellencies, so we succeed in lighting our torch at those glorious beams of old, our advances are at least entitled to that respect they universally meet with. An abject imitation is of all things that I should avoid. But that reading of, and conversing with a picture, that almost places us under a delusion, during the time we are under its influence; that associating our feelings and ideas—that blending of our aspirations with the master mind that thought and wrought so well, is the surest hemisphere in which we can hope to think and paint like them. The student's perceptions become annealed by the influence of the charm that invests him: he aspires to a higher latitude of excellence: he beholds before him the ripest fruit on the topmost palm, and he knows the principles and the laws by which he can reach it, and does reach it, by the agency of, and the gradual developement of the simple rules he commenced with.
It often happens, and it is my opinion, that a careless scribbler, who dashes at everything, stands quite as good a chance of becoming original, as the most careful copyist ever will; after the very first attempts, too much precision stands sadly in the way of boldness, freedom and dexterity. After being enabled to draw with some degree of accuracy, mannerism will invariably be the result of the extreme care so universally recommended by most writers on the subject; and hence that excess of it we daily observe; for it requires but a very common-place observer, on entering an exhibition, to point to a picture and name the painter at the same moment: presuming he had ever seen a work by the same artist before.
Reynolds says of copying, 'I consider general copying as a delusive kind of industry; the student falls into the dangerous habit of imitating, without selecting, and of labouring without any determinate object; as it requires no effort of the mind, he sleeps over his work, and those powers of invention and composition which ought particularly to be called out, and put in action, lie torpid and lose their energy for want of exercise. How incapable those are of producing anything of their own who have spent much of their time in making finished copies, is well known to all who are conversant with our art.'
ON THE LIGHT AND SHADE OF COLOUR: AND REFLEXES.
Colour is called in aid of Light and Shade, to dress and ornament it; but not to distort and disfigure it.