Art vs nature

"The first stage of the art collector is that in which his admiration dwells on imitation such as the still-life painter gives him, but soon (...)  he seeks the constructive sense of the man who paints the picture.
In the same manner does the student usually develop. With the book of nature before him he is eager to sit down anywhere and read, attracted by each separate item of the vast pattern, but he finds he has opened nature's dictionary and that to make poetry or even good prose he must put the separate words and phrases together."

"Good art, of the gallery, is the best guide to a trip afield"

"Personality in 99 cases out of a hundred is a graft. The forms of artistic expression have been pre-empted long ago."

That's from "Pictorial Composition" by H.R. Poore, published in 1903. Digitized by Gutenberg project:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26638/26638-h/26638-h.html