is is facsimiled
from an engraving after Titian, but an engraving not quite first-rate in
manner, the leaves being a little too formal; still, it is a good enough
model for your times of rest; and when you cannot carry the thing even
so far as this, you may sketch the forms of the masses, as in Fig.
16,[22] taking care always to have thorough command over your hand;
that is, not to let the mass take a free shape because your hand ran
glibly over the paper, but because in Nature it has actually a free and
noble shape, and you have faithfully followed the same.

101. And now that we have come to questions of noble shape, as well as
true shape, and that we are going to draw from Nature at our pleasure,
other considerations enter into the business, which are by no means
confined to first practice, but extend to all practice; these (as this
letter is long enough, I should think, to satisfy even the most exacting
of correspondents) I will arrange in a second letter; praying you only
to excuse the tiresomeness of this first one--tiresomeness inseparable
from directions touching the beginning of any art,--and to believe me,
even though I am trying to set you to dull and hard work,

Very faithfully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] (_N.B._--This note is only for the satisfaction of incredulous
or curious readers. You may miss it if you are in a hurry, or are
willing to take the statement in the text on trust.)

The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience. We
see nothing but flat colors; and it is only by a series of
experiments that we find out that a stain of black or gray indicates
the dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates
that the object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical
power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the
_innocence of the eye_; that is to say, of a sort of childish
perception of these flat stains of color, merely as such, without
consciousness of what they signify,--as a blind man would see them
if suddenly gifted with sight.

For instance: when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certain
directions, it is turned from green into a peculiar and somewhat
dusty-looking yellow. If we had been born blind, and were suddenly
endowed with sight on a piece of grass t