_Bakhuizen_ (Dutch: 1631-1708). _See 204._
On representations of rough weather by this painter and Vandevelde,
Ruskin writes as follows: "If one could but arrest the connoisseurs in
the fact of looking at them with belief, and, magically introducing the
image of a true sea-wave, let it roll up through the room,--one massive
fathom's height and rood's breadth of brine, passing them by but
once,--dividing, Red-Sea like, on right hand and left,--but at least
setting close before their eyes, for once in inevitable truth, what
a sea-wave really is; its green mountainous giddiness of wrath, its
overwhelming crest--heavy as iron, fitful as flame, clashing against
the sky in long cloven edge,--its furrowed flanks all ghastly clear,
deep in transparent death, but all laced across with lurid nets of
spume, and tearing open into meshed interstices their churned veil of
silver fury, showing still the calm gray abyss below; that has no fury
and no voice, but is as a grave always open, which the green sighing
mounds do but hide for an instant as they pass. Would they, shuddering
back from this wave of the true, implacable sea, turn forthwith to the
papillotes? It might be so. It is what we are all doing, more or less,
continually" (_Harbours of England_, p. 19). In default of the actual
sea-wave, the visitor may be recommended to look next at Turner's
rough seas (472 and 476). Such a comparison will show how much of the
roughness in the Dutch pictures is due to mere blackness, how little to
any terror in the forms of the waves, such as Turner depicts.