Excerpt from Six Lectures on Painting: Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, January 1904 I think we may consider that extraordinary genius, William Blake, who was once a student of these schools, to be the real forerunner of the pre-raphaelite movement. Writing in 1809, he draws attention to the clearness and beauty of the early Italian pictures, praising their precision and hardness, which he contrasts with the art of Rubens, Titian, and Rembrandt, whom he calls smudgers, blunderers, and daubers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.