The American writer Henry David Thoreau did not encounter the writings of John Ruskin until after Walden’s publication in 1854, but Thoreau’s classic account of life on Walden Pond marked the beginning of his interest in how the landscape artist perceived nature—and how the materials and methods of drawing and painting could yield both new ways of seeing nature and a new vocabulary for describing pictorial effects. Thoreau had already experimented with sketching in his journal, and his work as a surveyor gave him expertise in the artist’s graphic tools. His first pictorial insights came from William Gilpin’s writings on the picturesque, which primed Thoreau to read widely in the works of John Ruskin. Thoreau’s immediate enthusiasm for Ruskin, especially for Modern Painters, was tempered somewhat by his critique of Ruskin’s natural theology; yet Thoreau’s very criticisms suggested to him new avenues for exploring the New England landscape with a painter’s perception. Thoreau’s posthumous essay “Autumnal Tints” is heavily indebted to Ruskin, as Thoreau uses Ruskin’s work to show how representations of nature could build on natural science while overcoming its limitations, revealing that Nature is herself a painter still greater than Turner.