If I might point out to you another defect, very prevalent of late, in
our pictures, and one of the same contracted character with those you so
happily illustrate, it would be that of the _want of breadth_, and in
others a perpetual division and subdivision of parts, to give what their
perpetrators call space; add to this a constant disturbing and torturing
of everything whether in light or in shadow, by a niggling touch, to
produce fulness of subject. This is the very reverse of what we see in
Cuyp or Wilson, and even, with all his high finishing, in Claude. I have
been warning our friend Collins against this, and was also urging young
Landseer to beware of it; and in what I have been doing lately myself
have been studying much from Rembrandt and from Cuyp, so as to acquire
what the great masters succeeded so well in, namely, that power by which
the chief objects, and even the minute finishing of parts, tell over
everything that is meant to be subordinate in their pictures. Sir Joshua
had this remarkably, and could even make _the features of the face_ tell
over everything, however strongly painted. I find that repose and
breadth in the shadows and half-tints do a great deal towards it.
Zoffany's figures derive great consequence from this; and I find that
those who have studied light and shadow the most never appear to fail in
it.
_Wilkie._