As a necessary consequence, however, of this manner of working, he never could be ranked among the inspired painters of the open air, nor could he ever be said to have dealt exhaustively with the problems presented by natural phenomena. He remained untouched by the subtleties of atmospheric effect, by the varieties of momentary illumination, or by the fleeting glories of aerial colour, which provide the student of nature's devices with the chief incentive to artistic effort. He was always too much concerned with the things at his feet, with matter that he could dissect and investigate, to give much thought to the broad and comprehensive scheme of which these things formed part. Whatever he arrived at in the way of a record of a natural effect was reached not so much by thorough understanding of the effect as a whole, as by an amazingly acute interpretation of the influence exercised by it upon the details upon which his eyes were fixed. An excellent instance of this is afforded in _The Blind Girl_, where he has given little enough attention to the grandeur of the passing storm-clouds, and has concentrated the whole of his energies upon the rendering, with supreme fidelity, of dripping weeds and a drenched hillside lighted by the rays of the setting sun. As a record of microscopic insight, the picture is superlatively successful; it could hardly be more closely reasoned out; but, as a representation of Nature in one of her most impressive moods, it is ineffectual and unconvincing. So, too, his most popular landscape, _Chill October_, falls short of greatness, because it is too plainly studied bit by bit, and part by part, and built up precisely by the careful putting in place of material collected for the pictorial purpose. It holds together, not because it has one great dominating intention, but because its construction is so ingenious, and its mechanism so workmanlike, that no single detail can be criticised as out of relation to the rest. It can hardly be called learned in design, nor can it be said to have any conspicuous dignity of style; yet the knowledge of form, the intimate observation of the growth of riverside vegetation, and the appreciation of autumnal colouring, which were turned to account by the artist in his treatment of the subject, make the canvas prominent among the greatest nature studies of modern times. No consideration of his influence and no review of his performance would be complete without an appreciative reference to his services to black and white. As a painter he has a secure place among the chief modern masters of the world; but what he did for pictorial art was paralleled, if not surpassed, by his assertion of the dignity and importance of illustration as a form of occupation for even the greatest of art workers.