For such men their study was their picture; they devised tents and huts in wild glens and upon waste moors, and spent weeks in elaborating their details directly from nature, instead of painting at home from sketches on the spot.
This was the fulfilment of his advice to young artists; and so far as young artists worked in this way, for purposes of study, he encouraged them.

But he did not fail to point out that this was not all that could be required of them.

Even such a work as Brett's "Val d'Aosta," marvellous as it was in observation and finish, was only the beginning of a new era, not its consummation.

It was not the painting of detail that could make a great artist; but the knowledge of it, and the masterly use of such knowledge.

A great landscapist would know the facts and effects of nature, just as Tintoret knew the form of the human figure; and he would treat them with the same freedom, as the means of expressing great ideas, of affording by the imagination noble grounds for noble emotion, which, as Ruskin had been writing at Vevey in 1854, was poetry.