GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 3M 



or so distinguished as those of 1854. To compare the 

 author's originals with the most successful of the chromo- 

 lithographs is to realize how much was lost by the 

 mechanical art of production. 



Philip Gosse as a draughtsman was trained in the school 

 of the miniature painters. When a child he had been 

 accustomed to see his father inscribe the outline of a 

 portrait on the tiny area of the ivory, and then fill it in 

 with stipplings of pure body-colour. He possessed to the 

 last the limitations of the miniaturist. He had no distance, 

 no breadth of tone, no perspective ; but a miraculous ex- 

 actitude in rendering shades of colour and minute peculiari- 

 ties of form and marking. In late years he was accustomed 

 to make a kind of patchwork quilt of each full-page illus- 

 tration, collecting as many individual forms as he wished 

 to present, each separately coloured and cut out, and then 

 gummed into its place on the general plate, upon which a 

 background of rocks, sand, and seaweeds was then washed 

 in. This secured extreme accuracy, no doubt, but did not 

 improve the artistic effect, and therefore, to non-scientific 

 observers, his earlier groups of coloured illustrations give 

 more pleasure than the later. The copious plates in A 

 Year on the Shore, though they were much admired at the 

 time, were a source of acute disappointment to the artist. 

 There exists a copy of this book into w^iich the original 

 vv^ater-colour drawings have been inserted, and the difterence 

 in freshness, brilliancy, and justice of the tone between 

 these and the published reproductions is striking enough. 

 The submarine landscapes in many of these last examples 

 were put in by Airs. Gosse, who had been in early life a 

 pupil of Cotman. 



Between 1853 and i860 my father lectured on several 

 occasions in various parts of England and Scotland, with 

 marked success. He was perhaps the earliest of those 



