Wyld would have taught me landscape-painting if I had asked him, and I did at a later period study water-color with him; but his practice in oil did not suit me, for this reason: it was entirely tentative, he was constantly demolishing his work, so that it was hard to see how a pupil could possibly follow him. The advantage in working under his eye would have been in receiving a great variety of sound artistic ideas; for few painters know more about _art_ as distinguished from nature. However, by mere conversation, Wyld has communicated to me a great deal of this knowledge; and with regard to the practical advantages of painting like him they would probably not have ensured me any better commercial success, as his style of painting has now for a long time been completely out of fashion.
My scheme in 1856 was to make a great slow boat voyage on the Loire, with the purpose of collecting a quantity of sketches and studies in illustration of that river; and my ardor in learning to speak French had for an immediate motive the desire to make that voyage without an interpreter. I have often regretted that this scheme was never carried out. I have since done something of the same kind for the Saône, but my situation is now entirely different. I am now obliged to make all my undertakings _pay_, which limits them terribly, and almost entirely prevents me from doing anything on a great scale. For example, these pages are written within a few miles of Loire side; the river that flows near my home is a tributary of the Loire; I have all the material outfit necessary for a great boating expedition, and still keep the strength and the will; but no publisher could prudently undertake the illustration of a river so long as the Loire and so rich in material, on the scale that I contemplated in 1856.
It is unnecessary to trouble the reader with my crude impressions of European painting in the Universal Exhibition of that year. I no more understood French art at that time than a Frenchman newly transplanted to London can understand English art. The two schools require, in fact, different mental adjustments. Our National Gallery had sufficiently prepared me for the Louvre, which I visited very frequently; and there I laid the foundations of a sort of knowledge which became of great use many years afterwards, though for a long time there was nothing to show for it.