its colour, and be sure you _have_ it, and not a spurious, treacherous,
half-measured piece of mutual concession, with the colours all wrong,
and the forms still anything but right. It is best to get into the habit
of considering the coloured work merely as supplementary to your other
studies; making your careful drawings of the subject first, and then a
coloured memorandum separately, as shapeless as you like, but faithful
in hue, and entirely minding its own business. This principle, however,
bears chiefly on large and distant subjects; in foregrounds and near
studies, the colour cannot be had without a good deal of definition of
form. For if you do not map the mosses on the stones accurately, you
will not have the right quantity of colour in each bit of moss pattern,
and then none of the colours will look right; but it always simplifies
the work much if you are clear as to your point of aim, and satisfied,
when necessary, to fail of all but that.

Now, of course, if I were to enter into detail respecting colouring,
which is the beginning and end of a painter's craft, I should need to
make this a work in three volumes instead of three letters, and to
illustrate it in the costliest way. I only hope at present to set you
pleasantly and profitably to work, leaving you, within the tethering of
certain leading-strings, to gather what advantages you can from the
works of art of which every year brings a greater number within your
reach;--and from the instruction which, every year, our rising artists
will be more ready to give kindly, and better able to give wisely.

And, first, of materials. Use hard cake colours, not moist colours:
grind a sufficient quantity of each on your palette every morning,
keeping a separate plate, large and deep, for colours to be used in
broad washes, and wash both plate and palette every evening, so as to be
able always to get good and pure colour when you need it; and force
yourself into cleanly and orderly habits about your colours. The two
best colourists of modern times, Turner and Rossetti,[234] afford us, I
am sorry to say, no confirmation of this precept by their practice.
Turner was, and Rossetti is, as slovenly in all their procedures as men
can well be; but the result of this was, with Turner, that the colours
have altered in all his pictures, and in many of his drawings; and the
result of it with Rossetti is, that, though his colours are safe, he has
sometimes to throw aside work tha