recommended is not brought forward
as absolutely the best, but only as the best which I can at present
devise for an isolated student. It is very likely that farther
experience in teaching may enable me to modify it with advantage in
several important respects; but I am sure the main principles of it are
sound, and most of the exercises as useful as they can be rendered
without a master's superintendence. The method differs, however, so
materially from that generally adopted by drawing-masters, that a word
or two of explanation may be needed to justify what might otherwise be
thought wilful eccentricity.

The manuals at present published on the subject of drawing are all
directed, as far as I know, to one or other of two objects. Either they
propose to give the student a power of dexterous sketching with pencil
or water-colour, so as to emulate (at considerable distance) the
slighter work of our second-rate artists; or they propose to give him
such accurate command of mathematical forms as may afterwards enable him
to design rapidly and cheaply for manufactures. When drawing is taught
as an accomplishment, the first is the aim usually proposed; while the
second is the object kept chiefly in view at Marlborough House, and in
the branch Government Schools of Design.

Of the fitness of the modes of study adopted in those schools, to the
end specially intended, judgment is hardly yet possible; only, it seems
to me, that we are all too much in the habit of confusing art as
_applied_ to manufacture, with manufacture itself. For instance, the
skill by which an inventive workman designs and moulds a beautiful cup,
is skill of true art; but the skill by which that cup is copied and
afterwards multiplied a thousandfold, is skill of manufacture: and the
faculties which enable one workman to design and elaborate his original
piece, are not to be developed by the same system of instruction as
those which enable another to produce a maximum number of approximate
copies of it in a given time. Farther: it is surely inexpedient that any
reference to purposes of manufacture should interfere with the education
of the artist himself. Try first to manufacture a Raphael; then let
Raphael direct your manufacture. He will design you a plate, or cup, or
a house, or a palace, whenever you want it, and design them in the most
convenient and rational way; but do not let your anxiety to reach the
platter and the cup interfere with your education