ow to paint, but to see how many ways there are of
painting. The great end of all study in painting is to train the eyes
to see relations, to see them in nature. It is not to see that there
are relations, but to see where they are; to recognize and to measure
and to judge them. Painting is the art of perception before
everything, and when you copy you only see, accept, what some one else
has already perceived. Copying does not help you to _perceive_, it can
only help to show you how something can be _expressed after_ it has
been perceived, and that is not the vital thing in the study of
painting. Handling, composition, management of color, technique of the
brush generally, may be studied by copying. These only--and for these
things it is useful and wise. But the beginner is not ready for these,
for they are not the alphabet, but the grammar of painting.

=Danger.=--The danger of too early copying is that the student learns
to set too much value on surface qualities rather than those to which
the surface is merely incidental. With this is the danger (a serious
one, and one hard to overcome the results of) that the student becomes
clever as a producer of pictures before he has trained his power to
see. He becomes a student of pictures rather than a student of nature,
and when in doubt will go to art rather than to nature for help and
suggestion. Could anything be more fatal? Consider the things that
student will have to unlearn before he can think a picture in terms of
nature--the only healthy, the only prolific way of thinking. He sees
always through other people's eyes, and thinks with other people's
brains, and feels other people's emotions; that is not creation; that
is the attitude for the spectator, not for the painter.

These things are all useful and good, but not for the beginner. Later,
when you have found out something for yourself, when you have ground
of your own to stand on, then you may not only without danger, but
with benefit, go to the work of other men to see the range of possible
point of view and expression, to see the scope of technical material
and individual adaptation; and so broaden your own mental view and
sympathy, possibly reform or educate your taste, and perhaps get some
hints which will help you in the solving of some future problem.

But rather than the undue sophistication which can result from unwise
copying,--the over-knowledge of process and surface, and
under-knowledge of nature,--i