Every successful work is rapidly performed; quickness is only execrable when it is empty--small. No one condemns the swiftness of an eagle.
To him who knows not the burden of process--the attributes that are to claim attention with every epocha of the performance--all attempt at swiftness will be mere pretence.
I am planning a large picture, and I regard all you say, but I do not enter into that notion of varying one's plans to keep the public in good humour. Change of weather and effect will always afford variety. What if Van der Velde had quitted his sea-pieces, or Ruysdael his waterfalls, or Hobbema his native woods? The world would have lost so many features in art. I know that you wish for no material alteration, but I have to combat from high quarters--even from Lawrence--the plausible argument that _subject_ makes the picture. Perhaps you think an evening effect might do; perhaps it might start me some new admirers, but I should lose many old ones. I imagine myself driving a nail; I have driven it some way, and by persevering I may drive it home; by quitting it to attack others, though I may amuse myself, I do not advance beyond the first, while that particular nail stands still. No man who can do any one thing well will be able to do any other different thing equally well; and this is true of Shakespeare, the greatest master of variety.
To work on the _Ladye_. Found part of the drapery bad, rubbed it out, heightened the seat she sits on, mended the heads again; did a great deal, but not finished yet. Any one might be surprised to read how I work whole days on an old drawing done many years since, and which I have twice worked over since it was rejected from the Royal Academy in '47, and now under promise of sale to White for £20. But I cannot help it. When I see a work going out of my hands, it is but natural, if I see some little defect, that I should try to mend it, and what follows is out of my power to direct: if I give one touch to a head, I give myself three days' work, and spoil it half-a-dozen times over.
In literature as in art the rough sketches of the masters are made for connoisseurs, not for the vulgar crowd.
It is true sketches, or such drawings as painters generally make for their works, give this pleasure of imagination to a high degree. From a slight, undetermined drawing, where the ideas of the composition and character are, as I may say, only just touched upon, the imagination supplies more than the painter himself, probably, could produce; and we accordingly often find that the finished work disappoints the expectation that was raised from the sketch; and this power of the imagination is one of the causes of the great pleasure we have in viewing a collection of drawings by great painters.