Indeed, the paintings of the fringe and surrounding of the sea which have been produced by British artists uphold worthily the best traditions of our school; they include much that proves indisputably the powers of our greater masters, and certainly they are more numerous than the pictures of the open sea. That this should be is scarcely surprising for, after all, the painters who risk the perils of the deep even for brief excursions are much fewer than those who wander along the coast in search of material, and to most men the combination of land and sea offers more attractive problems than the less-known waste of waters. Moreover, there is a wider public for the coast scene (and few artists can afford to disregard the popular demand), because the great majority of people gain their impressions of the sea by looking at it from the land and but rarely seek for experiences afloat. The purely marine subject seen intimately and interpreted finely offers opportunities for a higher type of achievement, and in some respects calls for more concentrated study; but where the land and sea meet there is a more obvious variety of pictorial suggestions and the touch of romantic sentiment is more apparent. It is not given to many people, artists or laymen, to feel the profound mystery and the dramatic grandeur of the open sea; there are plenty, however, who can sense the appeal of the broken and battered coast and find romance in the harbours and tidal inlets. From a purely technical standpoint the coast picture is also more convenient than the painting of the open sea; it is easier to compose satisfactorily and to arrange in proper order. As a matter of space-filling and pattern-making it is much less difficult to construct a design with the vertical or sloping lines of cliffs or rocks contrasting with the horizontals of the sea than it is when the picture is divided into sea and sky with nothing to break the severe simplicity of the composition. This technicality has evidently perplexed many sea painters, and has not infrequently led them into rather strained devices to obtain variety--into exaggeration of the tones of the sky and over-accentuation of cloud forms, or into the introduction of shipping where the subject was already too complicated to require an added interest. Such evasions of a difficulty by artificial means are, however, not to be defended, and the artist who feels that the purely marine picture is too great a tax upon his powers had better not stray from the coast where there is plenty of more amenable pictorial material at his disposal. He is a wise man who recognizes his own limitations and does not invite trouble by trying to conceal his deficiencies in a branch of practice for which he is unsuited.