When is a man studying from nature, and when is he only flattering
himself that he is doing so because he is painting with a model or
lay-figure before him? A man may be working his eight or nine hours a
day from the model and yet not be studying from nature. He is painting
but not studying. He is like the man in the Bible who looks at himself
in a glass and goeth away forgetting what manner of man he was. He will
know no more about nature at the end of twenty years than a priest who
has been reading his breviary day after day without committing it to
memory will know of its contents. Unless he gets what he has seen well
into his memory, so as to have it at his fingers’ ends as familiarly as
the characters with which he writes a letter, he can be no more held to
be familiar with, and to have command over, nature than a man who only
copies his signature from a copy kept in his pocket, as I have known
French Canadians do, can be said to be able to write. It is painting
without nature that will give a man this, and not painting directly from
her. He must do both the one and the other, and the one as much as the
other.