Claude Monet evidently knew this, and got over the difficulty by painting on an absorbent canvas, which sucks the surplus oil out from below and thus prevents its coming to the surface and discolouring the work in time.  When this thick manner of painting is adopted, an absorbent canvas should always be used.  It also has the advantage of giving a dull dry surface of more brilliancy than a shiny one.

Although not so much as with painting, varieties of texture enter into drawings done with any of the mediums that lend themselves to mass drawing; charcoal, conte crayon, lithographic chalk, and even red chalk and lead pencil are capable of giving a variety of textures, governed largely by the surface of the paper used.  But this is more the province of painting than of drawing proper, and charcoal, which is more painting than drawing, is the only medium in which it can be used with much effect.

[Sidenote:  Variety of Edges.]

There is a very beautiful rhythmic quality in the play from softness to sharpness on the edges of masses.  A monotonous sharpness of edge is hard, stern, and unsympathetic.  This is a useful quality at times, particularly in decorative work, where the more intimate sympathetic qualities are not so much wanted, and where the harder forms go better with the architectural surroundings of which your painted decoration should form a part.  On the other hand, a monotonous softness of edge is very weak and feeble-looking, and too entirely lacking in power to be desirable.  If you find any successful work done with this quality of edge unrelieved by any sharpnesses, it will depend on colour, and not form, for any qualities it may possess.

Some amount of softness makes for charm, and is extremely popular:  “#I do# like that because it’s so nice and soft” is a regular show-day remark in the studio, and is always meant as a great compliment, but is seldom taken as such by the suffering painter.  But a balance of these two qualities playing about your contours produces the most delightful results, and the artist is always on the look out for such variations.  He seldom lets a sharpness of edge run far without losing it occasionally.  It may be necessary for the hang of the composition that some leading edges should be much insisted on.  But even here a monotonous sharpness is too dead a thing, and although a firmness of run will be allowed to be felt, subtle variations will be introduced to prevent deadness.  The Venetians from Giorgione’s time were great masters of this music of edges.  The structure of lines surrounding the masses on which their compositions are built were fused in the most mysterious and delightful way.  But although melting into the surrounding mass, they are always firm and never soft and feeble.  Study the edge in such a good example of the Venetian manner as the “Bacchus and Ariadne” at the National Gallery, and note where they are hard and where lost.