aying that in landscape Turner must be your only
guide, you perhaps have thought I said so because of his great power
in melting colors or in massing light and shade. Not so. I have always
said he is the only great landscape-painter, and to be your only
guide, because he is the only landscape-painter who can draw an
outline.

His finished works perhaps appear to you more vague than any other
master's: no man loses his outlines more constantly. You will be
surprised to know that his frankness in losing depends on his
certainty of finding if he chooses; and that, while all other
landscape-painters study from Nature in shade or in color, Turner
always sketched with the point.

"Always," of course, is a wide word. In your copying series I have put
a sketch by Turner in color from Nature; some few others of the kind
exist, in the National Gallery and elsewhere. But, as a rule, from his
boyhood to the last day of his life, he sketched only with the fine
pencil point, and always the outline, more if he had time, but at
least the outline, of every scene that interested him; and in general,
outline so subtle and elaborate as to be inexhaustible in examination
and uncopiable for delicacy.

Here is a sketch of an English park scene which represents the average
character of a study from Nature by Turner; and here the sketch from
Nature of Dumblane Abbey for the _Liber Studiorum_, which shows you
what he took from Nature, when he had time only to get what was most
precious to him.

21. The first thing, therefore, you have to learn in landscape, is to
outline; and therefore we must now know precisely what an outline is,
how it ought to be represented; and this it will be right to define
in quite general terms applicable to all subjects.

We saw in the fifth Lecture[5] that every visible thing consisted of
spaces of color, terminated either by sharp or gradated limits.
Whenever they are sharp, the line of separation, followed by the point
of your drawing instrument, is the proper outline of your subject,
whether it represents the limits of flat spaces or of solid forms.

[Footnote 5: "Lectures on Art, 1870," Sec. 130.]

22. For instance, here is a drawing by Holbein of a lady in a dark
dress, with bars of black velvet round her arm. Her form is seen
everywhere defined against the light by a perfectly sharp linear limit
which Holbein can accurately draw with his pen; the patches of velvet
are also distinguished from the rest o