ell as recorded
practice of the most splendid Greek and Italian draughtsmen; and you may
be assured it will lead you, however slowly, to great and certain skill.
To what degree of skill, must depend greatly on yourselves; but I know
that in practice of this kind you cannot spend an hour without
definitely gaining, both in true knowledge of art, and in useful power
of hand; and for what may appear in it too difficult, I must shelter or
support myself, as in beginning, so in closing this first lecture on
practice, by the words of Reynolds: "The impetuosity of youth is
disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege, and desires, from
mere impatience of labour, to take the citadel by storm. They must
therefore be told again and again that labour is the only price of solid
fame; and that, whatever their force of genius may be, there is no easy
method of becoming a good painter."

LECTURE VI

LIGHT

146. The plan of the divisions of art-schools which I gave you in the
last lecture is of course only a first germ of classification, on which
we are to found farther and more defined statement; but for this very
reason it is necessary that every term of it should be very clear in
your minds.

And especially I must explain, and ask you to note the sense in which I
use the word "mass." Artists usually employ that word to express the
spaces of light and darkness, or of colour, into which a picture is
divided. But this habit of theirs arises partly from their always
speaking of pictures in which the lights represent solid form. If they
had instead been speaking of flat tints, as, for instance, of the gold
and blue in this missal page, they would not have called them "masses,"
but "spaces" of colour. Now both for accuracy and convenience' sake, you
will find it well to observe this distinction, and to call a simple flat
tint a space of colour; and only the representation of solid or
projecting form a mass.

I use, however, the word "line" rather than "space" in the second and
third heads of our general scheme, at p. 94, because you cannot limit a
flat tint but by a line, or the locus of a line: whereas a gradated
tint, expressive of mass, may be lost at its edges in another, without
any fixed limit; and practically is so, in the works of the greatest
masters.

147. You have thus, in your hexagonal scheme, the expression of the
universal manner of advance in painting: Line first; then line enclosing
flat spaces c