Therefore and above all, Gauguin told his pupils not to draw from the model, but from memory. He admitted that it was useful for young painters to have a model, as all knowledge of facts could only be obtained from the study of models. But he added that it was better to draw a curtain before the model while painting it. One of his pupils declared: "We went into the country to paint seascapes and to the seashore to do landscapes." Gauguin's teaching in this respect exactly agrees with the methods practiced for centuries by the great Chinese and Japanese painters. He would have enjoyed that story of a Chinese painter, who was sent out by the Emperor to paint the most celebrated landscape views in the Empire, and who returned without having painted anything. When the Emperor asked him: "But where are your pictures?" he replied: "I have them here"--and pointed to his forehead. Gauguin, with his hatred of copying either from nature or from the masters of the past, would also have appreciated the Chinese idea of a "copy"--a free rearrangement of old material according to one's temperament. Lastly, he counseled his pupils not to paint movement but repose. "Let everything you do breathe peace and calm of soul. Avoid all animated attitudes. Each of your figures should be perfectly static. Give everything a clear outline." This counsel sounds strange to ears deafened by the tumult of modern life and by the clamorous theories of Cubists, Futurists and Vorticists. But to Gauguin it was the basis of his own mystical religion. He gave it to the world, however, not for this reason, but because he realized that painting to be decorative must be architectural. He himself was a builder, an artisan. In Brittany he painted the walls and windows of the inn where he lived; he made furniture, carved and ornamented a pair of wooden sabots for himself, worked at bas-reliefs, decorated pottery. Movement, restlessness, would have but troubled the lines of that ideal building, which, even then, he was erecting in his dreams.