The Painter in oil

its own peculiar proportions, and its own peculiar arrangement of spar and rigging.
Whether you are complete or not in the detailing of the masts and rigging, you must
know and represent the true character of the craft you are painting. You must take the
trouble to know how, why, and when sails are set, and what are the kinds, number, and
proportion of them, and their arrangement on any kind of vessel or boat you may paint.
There is again on1y one way to know this. If you are not especially a painter of marines,
you may find that the study of some particular vessel in its present condition and
relation to surrounding things will serve your turn; but if you go in for the painting of
marine pictures generally, you can only get to know vessels by being on and about them
at all seasons and p1aces. Your regular marine painter fills dozens and hundreds of
sketch-books with pencilled notes of details and positions and accidents and incidents of
all sorts and conditions of ships. Ships under full sail and under reefed canvas; ships in a
squall and ships in dead calm - he can never have too many of these facts to refer to.
The true marine painter is nine parts a sailor. If he does not take, or has not taken a
voyage at sea, at least has passed and does pass a large part of his time among vessels
and sailors. He knows them both; his details are facts that he understands. And what he
puts in or leaves out of a painting is done with the full knowledge of its relative
importance to his picture and to the significance of the ship.
All this sounds like a good deal to undertake; but to the man who loves the water and
what sails upon it; it is only following his liking, and anyone who does not love all this
should content himself with only the most incidental sea painting; for sea pictures are
not to be painted from recipes any more than any other thing, and ships particularly
cannot be represented without an understanding of them. And after all, you do not have
to do all this study at once. If you will only study well each thing that you do, and never
paint one vessel or boat without understanding that one; if you will study the one you are
doing now, and will do the same every time, - eventually you will have piled up a vast
deal of knowledge without having realized how much you were doing.
Color of Water. - You must study the color of water in the large when you paint it.
Remember that its color depends on other things than what it is itself. The character of
the bottom, whether it be rocky or sandy, and the depth of the water, will affect its color;
and to one accustomed to see these things, the picture betrays its truth or falsity at a
glance, especially as the character of the wave and the great movement of the whole
surface are influenced by the same things.