DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18972#0213
letter ii.] SKETCHING FROM NATURE.
185
when seen through it, will take a red or violet-
coloured bloom on its surface, and will be made pure
emerald green by transmitted sunshine through its
edges. With all this, however, you are not much
concerned at present, but I tell it you partly as a
preparation for what we have afterwards to say about
colour, and partly that you may approach lakes and
streams with reverence, and study them as carefully
as other things, not hoping to express them by a few
horizontal dashes of white, or a few tremulous blots.1
Not but that much may be done by tremulous blots,
when you know precisely what you mean by them,
as you will see by many of the Turner sketches,
which are now framed at the National Cfallery; but
1 It is a useful piece of study to dissolve some Prussian blue
in water, so as to make the liquid definitely blue : fill a large
white basin with the solution, and put anything you like to
float on it, or lie in it; walnut shells, bits of wood, leaves of
flowers, &c. Then study the efTects of the reflections, and of
the stems of the flowers or submerged portions of the floating
objects, as they appear through the blue liquid; noting espe-
cially how, as you lower your head and look along the surface,
you see the reflections clearly; and how, as you raise your
head, you lose the reflections, and see the submerged stems
clearly.
185
when seen through it, will take a red or violet-
coloured bloom on its surface, and will be made pure
emerald green by transmitted sunshine through its
edges. With all this, however, you are not much
concerned at present, but I tell it you partly as a
preparation for what we have afterwards to say about
colour, and partly that you may approach lakes and
streams with reverence, and study them as carefully
as other things, not hoping to express them by a few
horizontal dashes of white, or a few tremulous blots.1
Not but that much may be done by tremulous blots,
when you know precisely what you mean by them,
as you will see by many of the Turner sketches,
which are now framed at the National Cfallery; but
1 It is a useful piece of study to dissolve some Prussian blue
in water, so as to make the liquid definitely blue : fill a large
white basin with the solution, and put anything you like to
float on it, or lie in it; walnut shells, bits of wood, leaves of
flowers, &c. Then study the efTects of the reflections, and of
the stems of the flowers or submerged portions of the floating
objects, as they appear through the blue liquid; noting espe-
cially how, as you lower your head and look along the surface,
you see the reflections clearly; and how, as you raise your
head, you lose the reflections, and see the submerged stems
clearly.