From Elizabeth Darwin to H. E. Darwin 3 April 1870

You remember we were talking work pictures the other day; my impression is that to educate onself in pictures or statuary one out to consider them much as one does much. When one first hears Beethoven it was hopeless to criticize or even to approve or disapprove, at least in my case; one simply sat & took it in; at first one merely coud enjoy details of slow movements (), & it was merely a matter of hearing him often & the same sound more than once; and at last one gets to decide whether one likes a piece or not, but it would always take a thorough musician to say exactly why—or at all events I shall never reach that stage. In the same way going into a gathering the great thing to be done is to get any picture you are looking at thoroughly into yur head without troubling much about its merits as you can. Forsyth says somewhere that from the absurd & contradictory opinions he has heard artists express on the merits of a picture is is evidently the work of a life to be able to form an opinion form an artists point of view, and that therefore he merely enjoys the picture as much as he can, & considers whether it expresses thoroughly what it intends to express@() I have just lately come upon a long note in Moore's Byron Child Harold Canto IV. where Sir J. Reynolds says that when he frist saw Raphael at the Louvre, he was greatly disappointed, but that he was cheered by finding that nearly all artists at first, who would () () it, were disappinted, he therefore set to work to admire what he knew he ought to admire. Therefore the great thing seems to be to see as many pictures by great painters as possible, and in order to remember them to classify them in one's mind in to schools and into earlier & later masters of each school"() I believe if one goes through to Italy looking carefully at all the best pictures one sees and getting up their connections in (), that one would enjoy thoroughly Dresden or Madrid or the Louvre and that coming to Italy a second time one would be in a position to say with some certainty what one liked or disliked & the reason. I look upon the first time to Italy merely as education.

If you can get at Cannes () Jameieson's early Italin painters—a little duodecimo— you will find it quite worth reading,it contains a short very well writting life of the chief painters.