bens' time. It is a good and valuable book in many
ways, and you are going to have some copies set you from it. But as a
type of academical chiaroscuro it will give you most valuable lessons
on the other side--of warning.

Here, then, is the academical Dutchman's notion of a swan. He has
laboriously engraved every feather, and has rounded the bird into a
ball; and has thought to himself that never swan has been so engraved
before. But he has never with his Dutch eyes perceived two points in a
swan which are vital to it: first, that it is white; and, secondly,
that it is graceful. He has above all things missed the proportion,
and necessarily therefore the bend of its neck.

56. Now take the colorist's view of the matter. To him the first main
facts about the swan are that it is a white thing with black spots.
Turner takes one brush in his right hand, with a little white in it;
another in his left hand, with a little lampblack. He takes a piece of
brown paper, works for about two minutes with his white brush, passes
the black to his right hand, and works half a minute with that, and,
there you are!

You would like to be able to draw two swans in two minutes and a half
yourselves. Perhaps so, and I can show you how; but it will need
twenty years' work all day long. First, in the meantime, you must draw
them rightly, if it takes two hours instead of two minutes; and, above
all, remember that they are black and white.

57. But farther: you see how intensely Turner felt precisely what the
Fleming did not feel--the bend of the neck. Now this is not because
Turner is a colorist, as opposed to the Fleming; but because he is a
pure and highly trained Greek, as opposed to the Fleming's low Greek.
Both, so far as they are aiming at form, are now working in the Greek
school of Phidias; but Turner is true Greek, for he is thinking only
of the truth about the swan; and De Wit is pseudo-Greek, for he is
thinking not of the swan at all, but of his own Dutch self. And so he
has ended in making, with his essentially piggish nature, this
sleeping swan's neck as nearly as possible like a leg of pork.

That is the result of academical work, in the hands of a vulgar
person.

58. And now I will ask you to look carefully at three more pictures in
the London Exhibition.

The first, "The Nativity," by Sandro Botticelli.[10] It is an early
work by him; but a quite perfect example of what the masters of the
pure Greek school did in Floren