Gerard Manley Hopkins, like many of his contemporaries, was drawn as a young man to the lively visual arts scene in London in the 1860s and 1870s. From a family of professional and amateur sketchers and illustrators, he initially considered a career as an artist. What, then, did Hopkins see? What pictures did he look at, and what did he sketch? How did the careful cultivation of his eye, under the formative influence of John Ruskin, shape his later life as a Jesuit poet? How do we get from a visual culture that Hopkins shared with many others of his time and place to the powerful originality of his mature poems? Analyzing evidence from Hopkins’s surviving sketches, letters, and journals, this chapter explores the effects of Hopkins’s visual education on the language, the prosody, and the shaping force of grace in the poems.