tline. If I were to ask you to paint it,
though its color is pleasant enough, you would still find it
uninteresting and coarse compared to that of a flower, or a bird. But
if I can engage you in an endeavor to draw its true forms in light and
shade, you will most assuredly find it not only interesting, but in
some points quite beyond the most subtle skill you can give to it.

32. You have heard me state to you, several times, that all the
masters who valued accurate form and modeling found the readiest way
of obtaining the facts they required to be firm pen outline, completed
by a wash of neutral tint. This method is indeed rarely used by
Raphael or Michael Angelo in the drawings they have left us, because
their studies are nearly all tentative--experiments in composition, in
which the imperfect or careless pen outline suggested all they
required, and was capable of easy change without confusing the eye.
But the masters who knew precisely before they laid touch on paper
what they were going to do--and this may be, observe, either because
they are less or greater than the men who change; less, in merely
drawing some natural object without attempt at composition, or greater
in knowing absolutely beforehand the composition they intend; it may
be, even so, that what they intend, though better known, is not so
good:--but at all events, in this anticipating power Tintoret, Holbein
and Turner stand, I think, alone as draughtsmen; Tintoret rarely
sketching at all, but painting straight at the first blow, while
Holbein and Turner sketch indeed, but it is as with a pen of iron and
a point of diamond.

33. You will find in your educational series[6] many drawings
illustrative of the method; but I have enlarged here the part that is
executed with the pen, out of this smaller drawing, that you may see
with what fearless strength Holbein delineates even the most delicate
folds of the veil on the head, and of the light muslin on the
shoulders, giving them delicacy, not by the thinness of his line, but
by its exquisite veracity.

[Footnote 6: At the Ruskin Drawing School, Oxford.]

The eye will endure with patience, or even linger with pleasure, on
any line that is right, however coarse; while the faintest or finest
that is wrong will be forcibly destructive. And again and again I have
to recommend you to draw always as if you were engraving, and as if
the line could not be changed.

34. The method used by Turner in the _Liber St