The Art Perspective is necessary to all Arts, where there is any occasion for Designing... but it is more particularly necessary to the Art Painting.… - Brook Taylor

The Greatest Masters have been the most guilty... The great Occasion of this Fault, is certainly the wrong Method that generally is used in the Education of Persons to this Art: For the Young People are generally put immediately to Drawing, and when they have acquired a Facility in that, they are put to Colouring. And these things they learn by rote, and by Practice only; but are not at all instructed in any Rules of Art. By which means when they come to make any Designs of their own, tho' they... don't know how to govern their Inventions with Judgment, and become guilty of so many gross Mistakes, which prevent themselves, as well as others, from finding that Satisfaction, they otherwise would do in their Performances.

[I]t may not be amiss to set down here two Approximations I have formerly hit upon. The one is a Series of Terms for expressing the Root of any Quadratick Equation; and the other is a particular Method of Approximating in the invention of Logarithms, which has no occasion for any of the Transcendental Methods, and is expeditious enough for making the Tables without much trouble.

The true and best way of learning any Art, is not to see a great many Examples done by another Person, but to possess ones self first of the Principles of it, and then to make them familiar, by exercising ones self in the Practice. For it is Practice alone, that makes a Man perfect in any thing.