general, quality of colour more than grandeur of composition, and
confined light rather than open sunshine: so that the really greatest
thoughts of the greatest men have always, so far as I remember, been
reached in dead colour, and the noblest oil pictures of Tintoret and
Veronese are those which are likest frescos.

Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little chalky and
coarse-looking, body-colour is, in a sketch, infinitely liker nature
than transparent colour: the bloom and mist of distance are accurately
and instantly represented by the film of opaque blue (_quite_
accurately, I think, by _nothing_ else); and for ground, rocks, and
buildings, the earthy and solid surface is, of course, always truer than
the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can
ever be.

Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds of
colour are equally illegitimate, if you think they will allow you to
alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is _no_ vehicle
or method of colour which admits of alteration or repentance; you must
be right at once, or never; and you might as well hope to catch a rifle
bullet in your hand, and put it straight, when it was going wrong, as to
recover a tint once spoiled. The secret of all good colour in oil,
water, or anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken to me by
Mulready: "Know what you have to do." The process may be a long one,
perhaps: you may have to ground with one colour; to touch it with
fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the interstices; a fourth
into the interstices of the third; to glaze the whole with a fifth; and
to reinforce in points with a sixth: but whether you have one, or ten,
or twenty processes to go through, you must go _straight_ through them,
knowingly and foreseeingly all the way; and if you get the thing once
wrong, there is no hope for you but in washing or scraping boldly down
to the white ground, and beginning again.

The drawing in body-colour will tend to teach you all this, more than
any other method, and above all it will prevent you from falling into
the pestilent habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has nearly
ruined our modern water-colour school of art. There are sometimes places
in which a skilful artist will roughen his paper a little to get certain
conditions of dusty colour with more ease than he could otherwise; and
sometimes a skilfully rased piece of paper