From Copley Fielding to Edwin Hayes is a wide step--a jump from the methods of the past to those of the present day. Yet in actual time the two men were not so widely separated, for Hayes was born some while before Fielding died, and counted several of the earlier British masters among his older contemporaries. Fielding, however, was brought up in a tradition which had a strong hold upon the painters who were working at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and he made no real effort to break away from it, though in his interpretation of it he was, in some respects, less narrow than his fellows. But the formula influenced him as it did nearly all the other men of that date, and it gave a sort of set pattern to the paintings even of those artists who had the sincerest possible desire to be faithful to nature and to study her seriously and persistently. The effect of this formula was to regulate the composition and to prescribe the introduction of shipping in certain specified positions so as to conform to an accepted pictorial convention. To its dominance is due the general similarity which can be perceived between the works of John Wilson, Chambers, Crawford, and Müller, here illustrated, and which could be followed out in many other pictures by the lesser painters of the time--a similarity which was neither accidental nor unconscious, but directly induced by adherence to what were held to be the correct principles of picture designing. Moreover, there seems to have been a belief then that a painting of the sea must have some added interest to assure it of popularity, for a sea without shipping prominently placed upon it was hardly ever attempted; an incident was almost always introduced or a story suggested. When Edwin Hayes began his career the earlier tradition was losing its authority and was being replaced by a less limited conception of the sea-painter’s mission. To some extent he came under it in his youth, but he was naturally responsive to new ideas and kept pace with the more modern developments. Anyhow, in his _Sunset at Sea_ (p. 63) there is no hint of the old convention, and there is no trace of the belief that an added interest was required to make a sea picture attractive. He was content to give faithfully his impression of the sea as it appeared before him, to tell no story save nature’s own, and to take for his incident the gleam of sunlight upon tossing waves stirred into movement by the wind--a poor subject, perhaps, according to the old standards, but one which to-day appeals to us as admirably satisfying and essentially complete.