Watercolor, by John Pike (Watson-Guptill, $12.50). One hundred and seventy-six jumbo-sized pages, half of them reproductions of watercolors by Mr. Pike, whose work is known to anyone who has ever read a magazine or frequented exhibits of watercolor art, half of them lessons in how to set about watercoloring—the works: what paints to buy, what brushes, what paraphernalia, how to handle the paints, how to compose the picture, about as much as an artist can do for you short of ghosting. The text is brilliantly lucid, like Mr. Pike’s own watercolors, and it is difficult to imagine a more helpful guide for the postulant watercolorist, or for that matter a higher ambition than to master this lambent art. The reviewer confesses that he did his best quickly to forget everything the Maestro teaches about watercolors which gets in the way of oil painting, the art form the reviewer is currently engaged in profaning. But amateur painting is a wholly private vice, unlike music-making, writing, or dramatizing, which are almost necessarily done at someone’s expense, and the joy is unsurpassable, so that even if Mr. Pike is guilty of egging you on (no doubt W-G Publications, if they had been around, would have published a book, You Too Can
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