Page:The practice of water-colour painting (IA cu31924014501971).pdf/39

know how to apply the lessons they have learned and how to adapt their knowledge to meet the local conditions under which their work has to be carried on. They have evolved their own way of handling the medium, they express with its assistance the æsthetic sentiment that is appropriate to them, and they have an independence of outlook and manner that absolves them entirely from the reproach of having merely adopted the ideas of other people. It is this independence that makes them such dangerous competitors, for it puts them beside us in the race for supremacy.

In Holland, for instance, there has grown up within comparatively few years a school of water-colourists which has already established a remarkable record of sound and well-considered achievement. It has secured the co-operation of many of the most able of the modern Dutch artists whose paintings are especially memorable for their dignity and breadth of style, and for the admirable management which is revealed in them of the better qualities of the medium. The power and directness of these paintings, their purity of