Read "Lectures on Art" by John Ruskin online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
126. You will, I doubt not, willingly permit me to begin your lessons in real practice of art in the words of the greatest of English painters: one also, than whom there is indeed no greater, among those of any nation, or any time, -- our own gentle Reynolds.
He says in his first discourse: -- "The Directors" (of the Academy) "ought more particularly to watch over the genius of those students, who being more advanced, are arrived at that critical period of study, on the nice management of which their future turn of taste depends. At that age it is natural for them to be more captivated with what is brilliant, than with what is solid, and to prefer splendid negligence to painful and humiliating exactness."