For the sea is with us a tradition, and the love of the sea is one of the strongest of our national instincts. Because we live on an island the sea is at the same time our protection from those who might seek to do us harm and our means of communication with the rest of the world; it safeguards us against dangers to which other less fortunately situated countries are constantly exposed, and yet it puts us directly in touch with even the most remote and apparently inaccessible peoples. Therefore we regard it naturally as a friendly influence in the lives of us all. But we owe it a debt of gratitude also for the effect it has had upon our British art. It is from our insular climate, from the mists and moisture which the sea brings, that those atmospheric qualities come which make the study of nature in the British Isles such a never-ending delight. It is the surrounding sea that encourages the rich growth of our vegetation, and that gives to our landscape its wealth of detail and its ample variety of colour. As the sea influences the manner of our national life, so it influences the quality, the sentiment, and the method of our art, helping us to build up a school which is insular in its merit and its expression, and national in its feeling and its intention. Yet, curiously enough, in the earlier period of British art history the names of few painters are recorded who perceived the pictorial interest of the sea or tried to realize its beauties. Indeed, at the beginning no attention was given to the study of open-air nature; landscape painting was not attempted seriously, and the study of atmospheric effects was generally disregarded. The artists of that time occupied themselves mainly with portraits--digressing occasionally into figure compositions--and took little account of anything but the purely human interest in art. They worked for the glorification of their patrons, to adorn the houses of the great, or to prove themselves good sons of the Church, not to bring about the conversion of the people who were insensible to nature’s charm. It would be scarcely fair, however, to accuse the earlier British artists of insensibility because they worked in this manner within circumscribed limits; they only followed, after all, what was the fashion of the schools in other countries. In Italy, for instance, during the splendours of the Renaissance, the study of landscape for its own sake was as little thought of as it was in Great Britain at the time of the Tudors. Many of the Italian masters introduced landscape backgrounds in their figure compositions, but it was landscape of a formal and conventionalized kind, a weaving together of details to form a pattern which was used merely to fill space or to add something to the point of the pictured story. It was never landscape seen and set down as the motive of the painting; at best it was only a sort of still life.