In a climate like that of the West Highlands, wooden floors at least are almost indispensable; but a camp so arranged ceases to be a travelling camp unless you have men and horses in your daily service like a Shah of Persia. It may be moved two or three times in a summer.
I have always had a fancy for double-hulled boats (now generally called catamarans), and had two of them on Loch Awe. This eccentricity was perhaps fortunate, as my boats were extremely safe, each hull being decked from stem to stern and divided internally into water-tight compartments. They could therefore ship a sea with perfect impunity, and although often exposed to sudden and violent squalls, we were never in any real danger. One of my catamarans would beat to windward tolerably well, but she did not tack quickly, and occasionally missed stays. However, these defects were of slight importance in a boat not intended for racing, and small enough to be always quite manageable with oars. Since those days I have much improved the construction of catamarans, so that their evolutions are now quicker and more certain. They are absolutely the only sailing-boats that combine lightness with safety and speed.
As to the practice of landscape-painting, I very soon found that the West Highlands were not favorable to painting from nature on account of the rapid changes of effect. Those changes are so revolutionary that they often metamorphose all the oppositions in a natural picture in the course of a single minute. I began by planting my hut on the island called Inishail, in the middle of Loch Awe, with the intention of painting Ben Cruachan from nature, but soon discovered that there were fifty Cruachans a day, each effacing its predecessor, so my picture got on badly. If I painted what was before me, the result was like playing successfully a bar or two from each of several different musical compositions in the vain hope of harmonizing them into one. If I tried to paint my first impression, it became increasingly difficult to do that when the mountain itself presented novel and striking aspects.
Every artist who reads this will now consider the above remarks no better than a commonplace, but in the year 1857 English landscape-painting was going through a peculiar phase. There was, in some of the younger artists, a feeling of dissatisfaction with the slight and superficial work too often produced from hasty water-color sketches, and there was an honest desire for more substantial truth coupled with the hope of attaining it by working directly from nature. My critical master, Mr. Ruskin, saw in working from nature the only hope for the regeneration of art, and my practical master, Mr. Pettitt, considered it the height of artistic virtue to sit down before nature and work on the details of a large picture for eight or ten weeks together. I was eagerly anxious to do what was considered most right, and quite willing to undergo any degree of inconvenience. The truth is, perhaps, that (like other devotees) I rather enjoyed the sacrifice of convenience for what seemed to me, at that time, the sacred cause of veracity in art.