_Gaspard Poussin_ (French: 1613-1675).
Among the artists who were most closely associated with
Nicolas Poussin (_see_ 39) were his wife's brothers, Giovanni
and Gaspard Dughet. The former was loved by Poussin as a
son; the latter was also his pupil and adopted his name,
though in France he is familiarly known as "Le Guaspre."
Gaspard was Poussin's junior by nineteen years, and the older
man, recognising his abilities, encouraged him to landscape
painting. By the time he was twenty, Gaspard had established
himself as an independent painter in Rome, and his works were
eagerly sought by lovers of art. The Palazzo Doria and the
Palazzo Colonna are especially rich in his works; the picture
now before us, by some considered Gaspard's masterpiece, was
formerly in the latter palace. Gaspard resided chiefly at
Rome, but he also rented houses at Frascati and at Tivoli.
In the noble scenery of those places and elsewhere in the
country around Rome, he found the subjects for many of his
best pictures. He worked so rapidly, we are told, that he
would often "finish a picture in a day." He had a genuine love
for nature, and also a passion for the chase. "A little ass,
that he cared for himself, his only servant, bore his entire
apparatus, provisions, and a tent, under which, protected
from the sun and wind, he made his landscapes." There is
(says Ruskin) more serious feeling in his landscapes, more
"perception of the moral truth of nature," and "grander
reachings after sympathy" than in those either of Nicolas or
of Claude. It is impossible to look at many of his pictures
in this Gallery without sharing the sense of grandeur and
infinity in nature which inspired them, and hence it is that
from Gaspard's own time till now they have enjoyed "a permanent
power of address to the human heart." But more than this
has been claimed for Gaspard. Critics thought they found in
his works faithful adherence to the truths of nature in sky
and trees. Ottley, for instance, in his _Catalogue of the
National Gallery_ (1826), speaks of Gaspard's "unrivalled
correctness of imitation." Against these claims Ruskin took
up his fiery parable. Gaspard's pictures are "full," he says,
"of the most degraded mannerism;" first and foremost, in his
search of a false sublimity, he painted every object in his
picture, vegetation and all, of one dull gray and brown; and
too many of his landscapes are now one dry, volcanic darkness.
And secondly, he had a total want of imagination in seizing
the true forms of natural objects, so that some passages of
his landscapes are, as we shall see, perfect epitomes of the
falseness to nature in the painters of that age[64] (collected
from _Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. §§ 3,
14; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. i. ch. v. § 12, sec ii. ch. ii. §
18; vol. iv. pt. v. ch. xvi. § 24).
These remarks cannot be better illustrated than in the present picture.
Abraham and Isaac--the former with a lighted torch, the latter with
the wood--are ascending the hill on the right to the sacrifice; while
Abraham's two servants await his return below. The whole spirit of the
picture is "solemn and unbroken," in perfect harmony with the subject.
But it is kept from being a really grand picture by the "hopeless want
of imagination" in the forms of the clouds, the colour of the sky, and
the treatment of the distant landscape. These painters, says Ruskin,
looked at clouds, "with utter carelessness and bluntness of feeling;
saw that there were a great many rounded passages in them; found it
much easier to sweep circles than to design beauties, and sat down
in their studies, contented with perpetual repetitions of the same
spherical conceptions, having about the same relation to the clouds
of nature, that a child's carving of a turnip has to the head of the
Apollo.... Take the ropy, tough-looking wreath in the 'Sacrifice
of Isaac,' and find one part of it, if you can, which is not the
repetition of every other part of it, all together being as round and
vapid as the brush could draw them" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii.
sec. iii. ch. iii. § 8). Equally deficient is the colour of the sky:--
"It is here high noon, as is shown by the shadow of the
figures; and what sort of colour is the sky at the top of the
picture? Is it pale and gray with heat, full of sunshine,
and unfathomable in depth? On the contrary, it is of a pitch
of darkness which, except on Mont Blanc or Chimborazo, is as
purely impossible as colour can be. He might as well have
painted it coal-black: and it is laid on with a dead coat of
flat paint, having no one quality or resemblance of sky about
it. It cannot have altered, because the land horizon is as
delicate and tender in tone as possible, and is evidently
unchanged; and to complete the absurdity of the whole thing,
this colour holds its own, without gradation or alteration, to
within three or four degrees of the horizon, where it suddenly
becomes bold and unmixed yellow. Now the horizon at noon may be
yellow when the whole sky is covered with dark clouds, and only
_one_ open streak of light left in the distance from which the
whole light proceeds; but with a clear, open sky, and opposite
the sun, at noon, such a yellow horizon as this is physically
impossible.... We have in this sky (and it is a fine picture,
one of the best of Gaspar's that I know) a notable example of
the truth of the old masters--two impossible colours impossibly
united!... Nor is this a solitary instance; it is Gaspar
Poussin's favourite and characteristic effect" (_ibid._, vol.
i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. i. § 10).
Lastly, the same want of truth is shown in the wide expanse stretching
away to the distance:--
"It is luminous, retiring, delicate and perfect in tone, and
is quite complete enough to deceive and delight the careless
eye to which all distances are alike; nay, it is perfect
and masterly, and absolutely right, if we consider it as a
sketch,--as a first plan of a distance, afterwards to be
carried out in detail. But we must remember that all these
alternate spaces of gray and gold are not the landscape itself,
but the treatment of it; not its substance, but its light and
shade. They are just what nature would cast over it, and write
upon it with every cloud, but which she would cast in play, and
without carefulness, as matters of the very smallest possible
importance. All her work and her attention would be given to
bring out from underneath this, and through this, the forms
and the material character which this can only be valuable to
illustrate, not to conceal. Every one of those broad spaces she
would linger over in protracted delight, teaching you fresh
lessons in every hair's-breadth of it, until the mind lost
itself in following her; now fringing the dark edge of the
shadow with a tufted line of level forest; now losing it for an
instant in a breath of mist; then breaking it with the white
gleaming angle of a narrow brook; then dwelling upon it again
in a gentle, mounded, melting undulation, over the other side
of which she would carry you down into a dusty space of soft
crowded light, with the hedges and the paths and the sprinkled
cottages and scattered trees mixed up and mingled together in
one beautiful, delicate, impenetrable mystery, sparkling and
melting, and passing away into the sky, without one line of
distinctness, or one instant of vacancy"[65] (_ibid._, vol. i.
pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 8).