We have every reason to be grateful to him for his solid and well-balanced common sense. Henry Moore as an imitator of Turner, following in the wake of a leader whom he could never overtake, would have been a wasted force in art. Henry Moore as a painter true to his own convictions, striving earnestly to set before us his extraordinarily intimate view of the sea, has established a standard against which the achievements of our modern sea painters can be measured most instructively, and has pointed out the principles on which these painters must work if they are to justify their effort. Knowledge such as Turner possessed is by its very vastness incomprehensible to the ordinary man; but knowledge like that which Henry Moore gathered is possible to other artists, though to few of them is given his capacity to express it, and to fewer still his sureness of touch and his command of executive method. What is particularly to be learned from Henry Moore’s pictures is the wide variety of matters which have to be studied by the men who aspire to paint the sea with a sufficient measure of artistic fitness. There are, of course, many ways of representing the sea pictorially--as a background or setting to some nautical incident; as an accessory in a scene which has humanity for its main interest; as a generalized scheme of colour or tone; as a decorative motive with conventionalized forms; or as a poetically indefinite fantasy in which nearly everything is left to the imagination of the beholder. But the most scholarly and serious way--Henry Moore’s way--is to analyse and dissect; to account for every variation in form and every changing gleam of colour; to find the reasons for each of the many kinds of wave movement; to learn the connexion between certain conditions of the weather and certain states of the sea; to know how to produce a sea picture which will be logical throughout and without contradictions of atmospheric effect which are calculated to excite the protests of the marine expert who knows his subject and is not inclined to take artistic licence into consideration. Henry Moore spared himself none of these exhaustive preparations and had the technical skill to make the outcome of them wholly attractive in artistic quality; that is why he ranks as a master at whose feet it is good for the would-be sea painter to sit in all humility.