A Little Dash Of The Brush Better -

Clara set to work in her lantern-lit studio. She cleaned the grime gently, revealing no hidden smile or twinkling eye—only dull pigments and clumsy brushwork. The original artist, she suspected, had been an amateur. Disappointed, she considered returning the piece untouched. But something stayed her hand: a faint, uneven texture near the woman’s collar.

That singular, often overlooked act is what we call . A Little Dash of the Brush

While not a fixed idiom, the phrase appears in art criticism and studio guides from the 19th and early 20th centuries. For example: Clara set to work in her lantern-lit studio