From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards there has been a steadily growing tendency to enlarge the scope of marine painting and to allow to the men who practise it more and more freedom in the assertion of their personal feeling in art matters. That is why so much material of the most varied character is available now for the illustration of this branch of pictorial production, and why so many artists seek in it opportunities for the display of their capacities. They can approach it from the point of view that suits them best, they can interpret what they find there in the way that seems to them most appropriate, and they can, if their study is sincere, get most closely into touch with nature’s secrets. One entirely legitimate point of view is given adequate demonstration in the two pictures, _The Kyles of Bute_ by C. Parsons Knight (p. 65), and _From the Dorsetshire Cliffs_ by John Brett (p. 67). Both pictures are records, plain and uncompromising statements of fact, and in neither of them is anything unaccounted for or any detail left for the imagination of the spectator to supply. Frankly, the intention of both painters was to put in everything that the most acute vision could detect in the scene represented and to attain completeness by painstaking effort; and undeniably both painters have justified themselves by the thoroughness with which they have carried out this intention. Yet to many people so much labour to prove the sincerity of the artist would seem to be unnecessary and to savour somewhat of pedantry; knowledge so lavishly displayed--and with such scrupulous regard for accuracy--is not always persuasive. But such pictures have every right to exist, and there is a place for them in art.