The Painter in oil

To take the last consideration first, you may be sure that is worth while to try to do good
work, and mainly because you may hope to do as good work as you want to do. That is,
precisely as good work you’re willing to take the trouble to learn to do. Talent is only
another name for love of a thing. If you love a thing enough to try to find out what is
good, to train you judgment; and to train your abilities up to what that judgment tells
you is good, the good work is only a matter of time.
You will notice that you must train you judgment as well as your ability; not all at
once, of course. But how can you hope to do good work if you do not know what good
work is when you see? If you have no point of view, view, how can you tell what you are
working for, what you are aiming at? And if you do not know you are aiming at, are you
likely to hit anything?
Train you judgment. - Let us say, then, that you must train your critical judgment.
How you to set about it?
In the first place, don’t set up your own liking as a criterion. Make up your mind that
when it comes to a choice between personal taste and that of some one who may be
supposed to know, between what you think and what has been consented to by all the
men who have ever had an opinion worthy of respect, you may rest assured that you are
wrong. It is when you have made up your mind to that, when you have reached the
mental attitude, you have taken a long step towards training your judgment; for you have
admitted a standard outside of mere opinion.
Another attitude that you should place your mind in is one of catholicity - one of
openness to the possibility of their being many ways of being right. Don’t allow yourself
to take it for granted that any one school or way of painting or looking at things is the
only right one, and that all the other ways are wrong. That point of view may do for a
man who has studied and thought, and finally arrived at that conclusion which suits his
mind and his nature, — but it will not do for a student. Such an attitude is a sure bar to
progress. It results in narrowness of idea, narrowness of perception, and narrowness of
appreciation. You should try all things, and hold fast to that which is good, and even
while holding fast to it, you should remember that was good and true for you is not
necessarily the only good in true for some one else.
You must not only hold to your own liberty of choice, but recognize the same right for
others. If this is not recognized, what room has originality to work in?
The range of subject, style, and of technical methods among acknowledged masters,
should alone be proof of the fact that there is no one way which is the only good way;
and if you would know how to judge and like a good picture, the study to really great
pictures, without regard to school, is the way to learn.
How to Look at Pictures. - The study of pictures means something more than
merely looking at them and counting figures in them. It implies the study of the
treatment of the subject in every way. The management of light and shade; the color;
composition and drawing; and finally those technical processes of brush-work by means
of which the canvas gets covered, and the idea the artist becomes visible. All these things
are important in some degree; they all go to the making of the complete work of art: and
you do not understand the picture, you do not really and fully judge it, unless you know
how to appreciate the bearing on the result, of all the means which were used to bring it
about. All this adds to your own technical knowledge as well as to your critical judgment,
both of which ends are important to your becoming a good painter.