button to main menu  Description of Sixty Studies, pp.vi-vii
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preface, page vi:-
Practice serves but to establish the unhappy mannerist in his vices. He repeats daily, what each repetition renders more disgusting, and at length sinks into obscurity, neglected, for new visionaries, by those who applauded the errors of his youthful pencil, and confirmed him in their adoption.
A similar, perhaps a greater danger exists in the study of landscape.
The antique, and the living subject, are easily accessible. They may both be successfully studied under the roof of Somerset House. But there is no roof, except the canopy of heaven,under which the landscape painter can study with advantage. Man, or his image, may be moved at pleasure;
page vii:-
but mountains remain eternally on their bases, and rivers flow in an unchanging current, far from the seat of rank and opulence, and the consequent residence of those artists, (and many they are) who prefer drinking the stream after it has passed through a variety of impure channels, to resorting to the fountain head. This cause combines with the influence of fashion, and the most opposite manners are thus generated. Those who are wrong do not even wish to be right; but, viewing all nature through the medium of a confirmed manner, pronounce every thing in art to be erroneous that does not exactly correspond with their practice.
Without, in the slightest degree,
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