When an artist is beyond question a master of his craft it is always particularly interesting to hear what he has to say about the principles by which his art is controlled and the methods he employs in his practice. It is, of course, in his work, in the things he creates, that he gives the complete expression of his convictions and that the full product of his experience is embodied, but by the aid of words he is able not only to declare the intention by which his expression has been directed but also to explain the technical processes which have enabled him to arrive at his results. His creed, once set down in writing, is made permanently available for the guidance of all who study his work and seek to realise his purpose; the statement of his methods becomes an enduring record to which those who come after him can refer when they wish to understand the manner of his production.
In this way, indeed, the educational value of the master’s precepts is maintained indefinitely. Even after his personal and living influence has been withdrawn his authority persists and his teaching remains active, because in all its essentials it is still within the student’s reach. Fashions in art may vary from time to time, but its fundamental principles do not change and the exposition of these principles which has served one generation is just as helpful to another.
Therefore, such a book as this “Treatise on Landscape Painting and Effect in Water Colours, from the first rudiments to the finished picture,” by David Cox, deserves as ready an acceptance to-day as it received when it was first published more than a century ago. David Cox is justly counted among the greater British masters—that can scarcely be disputed—he was also a teacher of very wide experience and he knew well how to enable others to profit by the knowledge he had accumulated. It was the fruit of this experience that he gathered in his “Treatise,” and it was in response to a demand from the people who were best able to judge the quality of his teaching that he undertook the preparation of the book. “The urgent and repeated solicitations of many of his pupils,” he says in his foreword, “have induced the author of this work to submit to the public those results which are the result of many years’ study, and which may guide the student in the selection of appropriate effects of nature, adapted to the different characters of landscape composition.”
