I had asked Mr. Ruskin to recommend me some landscape-painter in London with whom I could study for six months. His answer was: "There is no artist in London capable of teaching you and at the same time willing to give lessons. All those who teach, teach mere tricks with the brush, not true art, far less true nature." He then recommended me to "go to William Turner, of Oxford, not for six months, but for six weeks." I was prevented from following this advice by a technical difficulty. Turner of Oxford was a water-color painter. I had learned water-color with two masters, but had never liked it or felt the slightest impulse to continue it. One man is naturally constituted for one process, another for another. There is something in my idiosyncrasy repugnant to the practice of water-color and favorable to oil, and this in spite of the greater convenience of water-color, and the facility with which it may be left off and instantaneously resumed. In after-life I learned water-color a third time with a very able artist, and now I am able to paint studies in that medium from nature which are truthful enough, and people seem to like them; but hitherto I have had no enjoyment whatever in the work. The reader will please understand that this implies no want of appreciation of the art when it is skilfully practised by others. There are certain instruments of music that one may listen to with pleasure without having the slightest desire to perform upon them. [Footnote: My estimate of the rank of water-color amongst the fine arts has steadily risen as the true technical relations of the graphic arts have become clearer to me. Water-color is quite as great an art as fresco, whilst it is incomparably more convenient.]
This being so, the reader will understand how I felt about going to William Turner of Oxford. Hour for hour, I would as willingly have read Greek as practise water-color washes. Not to trouble Mr. Ruskin, however, any further with my affairs, I tried to induce several well-known oil-painters to accept me as a pupil, but always met with the same answer, that they "did not teach." It was rather a matter of pride in those days for a successful painter to decline to give lessons; it proved him to be above the grade of a drawing-master.