s to be preferred a frank crudeness of
work which is the result of an honest going to nature for study. You
should not expect a perfect eye for color and form too soon. Better a
healthily youthful crudity of perception based on nature, and standing
for what you have yourself studied and worked out, which represents
your own attainment, than a greater show of knowledge which is
insincere and superficial because it represents a mere acceptance of
the facts set down by others; and not only that, but even with it an
acceptance also of the actual terms used by those others.

Often copying is the most convenient way in which you can get help.
There is really much to be learned from it, and you can make a picture
serve as a criticism on your own work. Particularly in the matter of
color or tone, as something to recognize the achievement of for its
own sake. If you can recognize good color as such, aside from what it
represents, if you can appreciate tone in a picture which is the work
of some one else, you are so much the more likely to notice the lack
of those qualities in your own work. So, too, there are qualities of
brush-work which are always good, and some which are always bad. You
can study the former positively, and the latter negatively, in
studying and copying other pictures.

I have mentioned the training of your critical judgment as a necessity
in your education. You can do it slowly in learning to paint, but you
can facilitate that training by copying and studying really good
pictures, if you do it in the right way.

=The Right Way.=--So if you do copy, do it in the right way, so as to
get all the real help out of it, and not so as to have to unlearn the
greater part of it. Don't copy "to get a picture." Don't make a copy
which at a distance has a resemblance to the original, but which on a
more careful study shows none of the qualities which make the original
what it is. Not only see to it that the same subtleties of perception
and representation are preserved in your copy, but that they are
attained in the same way. Use the same brush-work or other execution.
Use the same pigments in the same places, with the same vehicles;
study the original with your brain as well as with your eyes and
hands; try to see not only how the painter did a certain thing but
why. So that as you work, you follow him in the working out of his
problem, and make it your problem also. In this way you will get some
real good from his pi