Next in importance to the study of the sea itself comes the acquisition of a capacity to paint shipping, the two do not necessarily go together. There have been many capable painters of the sea who could not draw a ship and did not know how to set it on the water; and there have been many men with an accurate technical knowledge of shipping whose treatment of the sea from the pictorial point of view left much to be desired. As a matter of fact, a ship provides one of the severest tests of draughtsmanship; it is such a complicated collection of lines and curves and so hard to put in proper perspective that it makes exceptional demands upon the artist’s powers. Moreover, every ship has its own individuality, a character peculiar to itself, and to express this individuality as much analytical effort is needed as to draw the right distinction between the differing types of humanity. Details which to the unprofessional eye seem of no significance must be carefully attended to because each one of them contributes something to the sum total of fact and helps to make the character intelligible, and to slur over these details is a fatal mistake. A ship treated conventionally and without personal insight is as uninspiring pictorially as a portrait which has missed all the little human characteristics which made the sitter interesting. The painter of shipping has, too, a very wide field to cover. He has to range from the yacht to the warship, from the liner to the rusty, weather-beaten tramp; he has to show how the lively movement of the sailing ship differs from the steady, methodical progression of the steamer; he has to understand the behaviour of all sorts of craft under all sorts of weather conditions; and to make this varied assortment of knowledge intelligible in his pictures he has to depend almost entirely upon his powers of drawing. By bad drawing he will not only miss the specific character of the ship, but he will also fail to explain the part that this ship is intended to play in the story which his picture seeks to tell. The introduction of shipping into a painting of the sea is usually to increase the dramatic strength of the subject, but if through technical inefficiency the added incident does not carry conviction or explain itself properly the point of the drama is obscured rather than accentuated.