Page:Masterpieces of the sea (Morris, Richards, 1912).djvu/88

WILLIAM T. RICHARDS for reproducing them enduringly with a brush. What you don't observe you cannot describe or depict. We have seen that this trait of unhurried and penetrating observation was one of those gifts on which Mr. Richards built his life. He meant to see nature close and see it whole, and he never faltered from the beginning in this principle of design and drawing. He needed to draw the movement and animation of breaking or surging waves, and he went to the best school in the universe, the surf itself. He found the picturing of the sea a tradition established by Claude and continued by Turner. Vague breadths and reaches of the shores and the ocean were suggested by color and form, and deep vistas of sunlight or cloud carried the eye away from fact into the unreality of visions—beautiful, inspiring and masterly as dreams; but more in the nature of "impressions" than those so-called of our time.

This rendition of the facts that Mr. Richards loved he could not accept. For him, nature was supremely 56