In Discourse IV (10 December 1771), Sir Joshua Reynolds compares the 'local principles' of the Dutch school with the keener and more general understanding of nature exemplified in Claude 's landscapes. The painters of the Dutch school, he notes 'are excellent in their own way' but are 'ridiculous when they attempt general history on their own narrow principles, and debase great events by the meanness of their characters'( Reynolds, Discourses, p.69). These failings, he argues, 'extend... to their landscape painters' and 'Rubens himself... has sometimes transgressed in this particular' ( Reynolds, Discourses, p.69). Reynolds believed that Dutch landscape painting was limited to the faithful representation of 'individual spot[s]'. Claude Lorrain, by contrast, 'was convinced, that taking nature as he found it seldom produced beauty'( Reynolds, Discourses, pp.69-70). Unlike Ruskin, who believed that Claude's understanding of nature was flawed, Reynolds esteemed the selective and conventional aesthetic by which the painter arrived at his pictures:
His pictures are a composition of the various draughts which he had previously made from various beautiful scenes and prospects... That the practice of Claude Lorrain, in respect to his choice, is to be adopted by Landschape Painters, in opposition to the Flemish and Dutch schools, there can be no doubt, as its truth is founded upon the same principle as that by which the Historical painter acquires perfect form. ( Reynolds, Discourses, p.70)
Reynolds's attitude to 'Accidents of Nature', the anomalies or wildness of form that appealed to the Romantic Ruskin, is more ambiguous than the praise he generally reserves for the painter.