ctures generally, you can only get to
know vessels by being on and about them at all seasons and places.
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 any one 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.

[Illustration: =Girl Spinning.= _Millet._
Example of "_contre jour_" and out-of-door contrast of light and
shade.]

CHAPTER XXXIII

FIGURES

The broadest classification of figure pictures is to consider them as
of two kinds,--those painted in an out-door or diffused light, and
those