ggio, Vandyck, Rembrandt, Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Turner, and the modern Pre-Raphaelites.[267] You had
better look at no other painters than these, for you run a chance,
otherwise, of being led far off the road, or into grievous faults, by
some of the other great ones, as Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Rubens;
and of being, besides, corrupted in taste by the base ones, as Murillo,
Salvator, Claude, Gasper Poussin, Teniers, and such others. You may
look, however, for examples of evil, with safe universality of
reprobation, being sure that everything you see is bad, at Domenichino,
the Caracci, Bronzino, and the figure pieces of Salvator.

Among those named for study under question, you cannot look too much at,
nor grow too enthusiastically fond of, Angelico, Correggio, Reynolds,
Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites; but, if you find yourself getting
especially fond of any of the others, leave off looking at them, for you
must be going wrong some way or other. If, for instance, you begin to
like Rembrandt or Leonardo especially, you are losing your feeling for
colour; if you like Van Eyck or Perugino especially, you must be getting
too fond of rigid detail; and if you like Vandyck or Gainsborough
especially, you must be too much attracted by gentlemanly flimsiness.

Secondly, of published, or otherwise multiplied, art, such as you may be
able to get yourself, or to see at private houses or in shops, the works
of the following masters are the most desirable, after the Turners,
Rembrandts, and Durers, which I have asked you to get first:

1. Samuel Prout.

All his published lithographic sketches are of the greatest value,
wholly unrivalled in power of composition, and in love and feeling of
architectural subject. His somewhat mannered linear execution, though
not to be imitated in your own sketches from Nature, may be occasionally
copied, for discipline's sake, with great advantage; it will give you a
peculiar steadiness of hand, not quickly attainable in any other way;
and there is no fear of your getting into any faultful mannerism as long
as you carry out the different modes of more delicate study above
recommended.

If you are interested in architecture, and wish to make it your chief
study, you should draw much from photographs of it; and then from the
architecture itself, with the same completion of detail and gradation,
only keeping the shadows of due paleness, in photographs they are always
about four times as dark