_Gaspard Poussin_ (French: 1613-1675). _See_ 31.
The scene is the beautiful avenue of oaks, called the "Galleria di
Sopra," which skirts the upper margin of the Lake of Albano. Ruskin
refers to this picture in illustration of his thesis that Turner's
"truth of vegetation," in his representation of the exceeding intricacy
of nature, is not to be paralleled among the old painters, and least of
all in Gaspard Poussin with his regular "tree-patterns." The picture
before us is "a woody landscape," which in nature would be a mass of
intricate foliage--
"a mere confusion of points and lines between you and the
sky.... This, as it comes down into the body of the tree,
gets closer, but never opaque; it is always transparent,
with crumbling lights in it letting you through to the sky;
then, out of this, come, heavier and heavier, the masses of
illumined foliage, all dazzling and inextricable, save here
and there a single leaf on the extremities: then, under these,
you get deep passages of broken irregular gloom, passing into
transparent, green-lighted, misty hollows ... all penetrable
and transparent, and, in proportion, inextricable and
incomprehensible, except where across the labyrinth and mystery
of the dazzling light and dream-like shadow, falls, close to
us, some solitary spray, some wreath of two or three motionless
large leaves, the type and embodying of all that in the rest we
feel and imagine, but can never see.
"Now, with thus much of nature in your mind, go to Gaspard
Poussin's 'View near Albano.' It is the very subject to unite
all these effects, a sloping bank shaded with intertwined
forest. And what has Gaspard given us? A mass of smooth,
opaque, varnished brown, without one interstice, one change
of hue, or any vestige of leafy structure, in its interior,
or in those parts of it, I should say, which are intended to
represent interior; but out of it, over it rather, at regular
intervals, we have circular groups of greenish touches,
always the same in size, shape, and distance from each other,
containing so exactly the same number of touches each, that
you cannot tell one from another. There are eight or nine and
thirty of them, laid over each other like fish-scales; the
shade being most carefully made darker and darker as it recedes
from each until it comes to the edge of the next, against
which it cuts in the same sharp circular line, and then begins
to decline again, until the canvas is covered with about as
much intelligence or feeling of art as a house-painter has in
marbling a wainscot, or a weaver in repeating an ornamental
pattern. What is there in this, which the most determined
prejudice in favour of the old masters can for a moment suppose
to resemble trees? It is exactly what the most ignorant
beginner, trying to make a complete drawing, would lay down;
exactly the conception of trees which we have in the works of
our worst drawing-masters, where the shade is laid on with
the black lead and stump, and every human power exerted to
make it look like a kitchen grate well polished"[89] (_Modern
Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. i. §§ 16-19).
A further "untruth of vegetation" is the perpetration of the bough at
the left-hand upper corner. This is--
"a representation of an ornamental group of elephants'
tusks, with feathers tied to the end of them. Not the
wildest imagination could ever conjure up in it the remotest
resemblance to the bough of a tree. It might be the claws of
a witch, the talons of an eagle, the horns of a fiend; but it
is a full assemblage of every conceivable falsehood which can
be told respecting foliage, a piece of work so barbarous in
every way, that one glance at it ought to prove the complete
charlatanism and trickery of the whole system of the old
landscape painters" (_ibid._, § 7).