Excerpt from The Art-Journal, 1866, Vol. 5 Practical work is useful also for the constant comparison it forces us to make. The qualities of things are impressed upon us by nothing so strongly as by comparison. In merely looking at nature, we compare nothing, or at the best only one part of nature, with another part, but in working actively, we continually compare our bad work with Nature's exquisite work, and so become much more acutely alive to the infinite beauty of the latter.
I believe that every reader who has drawn much will agree with me, that he knew nothing about the objects most familiar to him until he had drawn them. I have had a striking illustration of this in my own recent experience. Though long accustomed to a country life, and (in a very small way) an owner of horses and cows, I never knew anything accurately about these animals until two years ago, when I began to make studies of them with a view to painting. Indeed I may very truly say that until last year I had never beheld an OK or a cow artistically at all, and, being clearly aware of this, postponed writing a projected article on Rosa Bonheur from the humiliating conviction that although living summer and winter on a large French farm, and intimately familiar with all the oxen on it, and their labours, personally friendly with them even, and calling them by their names, I had not yet, in the deep critical and artistic sense, seen them.
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