model, an attempt is made to prepare a corresponding tone; no medium
must be used; and when the, large square brush is filled full of
sticky, clogging pigment it is drawn half an inch down and then half
an inch across the canvas, and the painter must calculate how much he
can finish at a sitting, for this system does not admit of
retouchings. It is practised in all the French studios, where it is
known as _la peinture au premier coup_.

A clever young man, a man of talent, labours at art in the manner I
have described from eight to ten hours a day, and at the end of six or
seven years his education is completed. During the long while of his
pupilage he has heard, "first learn your trade, and then do what you
like". The time has arrived for him to do what he likes. He already
suspects that the mere imitation of MM. Bouguereau and Lefebvre will
bring him neither fame nor money; he soon finds that is so, and it
becomes clear to him he must do something different. Enticing vistas
of possibilities open out before him, but he is like a man whose limbs
have been kept too long in splints--they are frozen; and he at length
understands the old and terrible truth: as the twig is bent so will it
grow. The skin he would slough will not be sloughed; he tries all the
methods--robust executions, lymphatic executions, sentimental and
insipid executions, painstaking executions, cursive and impertinent
executions. Through all these the Beaux Arts student, if he is
intelligent enough to perceive the falseness and worthlessness of his
primary education, slowly works his way. He is like a vessel without
ballast; he is like a blindfolded man who has missed his pavement; he
is blown from wave to wave; he is confused with contradictory cries.
Last year he was robust, this year he is lymphatic; he affects
learning which he does not possess, and then he assumes airs of
ignorance, equally unreal--a mild, sophisticated ignorance, which he