assistance of an academical education, without travelling to Italy, or
any of those preparatory studies which have been so often recommended,
he is produced

[Illustration: PLATE XLI.--THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH

THE MARKET CART

_National Gallery, London_]

as an instance how little such studies are necessary, since so great
excellence may be acquired without them. This is an inference not
warranted by the success of any individual, and I trust that it will not
be thought that I wish to make this use of it.

"It must be remembered that the style and department of art which
Gainsborough chose, and in which he so much excelled, did not require
that he should go out of his own country for the objects of his study;
they were everywhere about him; he found them in the streets, and in the
fields; and from the models thus accidentally found he selected with
great judgment such as suited his purpose. As his studies were directed
to the living world principally, he did not pay a general attention to
the works of the various masters, though they are, in my opinion, always
of great use even when the character of our subject requires us to
depart from some of their principles. It cannot be denied that
excellence in the department of the art which he professed may exist
without them, that in such subjects and in the manner that belongs to
them the want of them is supplied, and more than supplied, by natural
sagacity and a minute observation of particular nature. If Gainsborough
did not look at nature with a poet's eye, it must be acknowledged that
he saw her with the eye of a painter; and gave a faithful, if not a
poetical, representation of what he had before him.

"Though he did not much attend to the works of the great historical
painters of former ages, yet he was well aware that the language of the
art--the art of imitation--must be learned somewhere; and as he knew he
could not learn it in an equal degree from his contemporaries, he very
judiciously applied himself to the Flemish school, who are undoubtedly
the greatest masters of one necessary branch of art, and he did not
need to go out of his country for examples of that school; from _that_
he learned the harmony of colouring, the management and disposition of
light and shadow, and every means of it which the masters practised to
ornament and give splendour to their works. And to satisfy himself, as
well as others, how well he knew the mechanism and artifice which they
e