I received your letter with pleasure, and must thank you for your opinions respecting the introduction of figures, etc., into pictures . . .
  I hope you will pardon me if I make a few remarks on what you have kindly said on compositions.  I agree with you cordially about the introduction of water in landscapes:  but I think there may be fine pictures without it.  I really do not conceive that compositions are so liable to be failures as you suppose, and bring forward an example in Mr. — .  If I am not misinformed, the first pictures which have been produced, both Historical and Landscape, have been compositions.  Raphael’s pictures, and those of all the great painters, are something more than imitations of nature as they found it . . . If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry.  You say Mr. — has failed in his compositions: perhaps the reason may be easily found—that he has painted from himself, instead of recurring to those scenes in nature which, formerly, he imitated with such great success.  If follows that the less he studies from nature, the further he departs from it, and loses the beautiful impress, of which you speak with such justice and feeling.  But a departure from nature is not a necessary consequence in the painting of composition: on the contrary, the most lovely and perfect parts of nature may be brought together, and combined in a whole, that shall surpass in beauty and effect any picture painted from a single view. I believe with you, that it is of the greatest importance for a painter always to have his mind upon nature, as the star by which he is to steer to excellence in his art.  He who would paint compositions, and not be false, must sit down amidst his sketches, make selections, and combine them, and so have nature for every object that he paints.  This is what I should endeavor to do: and I think you will agree with me, that such a course embraces all the advantage obtained in painting actual views, without the objections.

THE DAGUERREOTYPE                                                                     Paris, May 1831
I suppose you have read a great deal about the Daguerreotype [an early form of photography ED.] .   If you believe everything the newspapers say (which, by-the-by-, would require an enormous bump of marvelousness), you would be led to suppose that the poor craft of painting was knocked in the head by this new machinery for making Nature take her own likeness, and we nothing to do but give up the ghost . . . But I was saying something about Daguerreotype matters—this is the conclusion: that the art of painting is a creative as well as an imitative art, and is in no danger of being superseded by any mechanical contrivance.  “What fine chisel did ever yet cut breath?”