Shorn thus of its stolen finery of theoretical prejudice and philosophical imposture the naked course of chronological sequence presents few attractions to the enthusiastic lover of the beautiful. It has, however, its uses. These are mainly mnemonical, for it supplies the thread on which we string together in our memory the things strewn along the schedule of the years without apparent rhyme or reason. The dates will not help us to pick out the good from the bad, but they help us to place among their proper surroundings the good things which our sympathies and instincts find for us. With this grudging apostrophe to the historical maid-of-all-work we will proceed with our survey of the brief tale of years during which our national school of water-colour painting has been in existence. The business of this chapter is to outline the development of form and content, of subject-matter and technique. For the beginnings of British landscape painting we must look to the drawings and engravings connected with the study of topography, using this word in the ordinary sense of place-drawing, or the description of a particular building or spot. Generally speaking the designs of the earlier draughtsmen are now known only through the engravings which were made from them. Roget, in his “History of the Old Water-Colour Society” (chapters i and iii, Book I) gives a full and interesting account of these engravings. The earliest drawings we need refer to are those of Samuel Scott (1710-1772) and his pupil, William Marlow (1740-1813), Paul Sandby (1725-1809), William Pars (1742-1782), Michael Angelo Rooker (1743-1801), and Thomas Hearne (1744-1817). Working alongside these artists was another group of men who produced “landscapes” which relied for their interest rather upon the sentiments evoked by their subject-matter and treatment than upon the purely topographical character of their work. These painters of poetical or sentimental landscape may be said to have begun with George Lambert (1710?-1765), Richard Wilson (1713-1782), and Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Of these only the latter used water-colour as an independent medium. His _Landscape with Waggon on a Road through a Wood_ (British Museum) reminds one somewhat of the landscape studies of Rubens and Van Dyck, at least as regards the colour-effect and the feeling for atmosphere. Through Gainsborough the influence of Rubens and that of the Flemish conception of landscape painting was brought to bear on British art, while Lambert and Richard Wilson familiarized the younger artists and their patrons with the style and aims of Poussin and Claude. The same influences are discernible in the works of Alexander Cozens (d. 1786) and his son, John Robert Cozens (1752-1799), both of whom worked almost entirely in water-colour.