It is a misfortune for all honest critics, that hardly any quality of

art is independently to be praised, and without reference to the motive

from which it resulted, and the place in which it appears; so that no

principle can be simply enforced but it shall seem to countenance a

vice; while the work of qualification and explanation both weakens the

force of what is said, and is not perhaps always likely to be with

patience received: so also those who desire to misunderstand or to

oppose have it always in their power to become obtuse listeners or

specious opponents. Thus I hardly dare insist upon the virtue of

completion, lest I should be supposed a defender of Wouvermans or Gerard

Dow; neither can I adequately praise the power of Tintoret, without

fearing to be thought adverse to Holbein or Perugino. The fact is, that

both finish and impetuosity, specific minuteness, or large abstraction,

may be the signs of passion, or of its reverse; may result from

affection or indifference, intellect or dulness. Some men finish from

intense love of the beautiful in the smallest parts of what they do;

others in pure incapability of comprehending anything but parts; others

to show their dexterity with the brush, and prove expenditure of time.

Some are impetuous and bold in their handling, from having great

thoughts to express which are independent of detail; others because they

have bad taste or have been badly taught; others from vanity, and others

from indolence. (Compare Vol. II. Chap. IX. Sec. 8.) Now both the finish

and incompletion are right where they are the signs of passion or of

thought, and both are wrong, and I think the finish the more

contemptible of the two, when they cease to be so. The modern Italians

will paint every leaf of a laurel or rose-bush without the slightest

feeling of their beauty or character; and without showing one spark of

intellect or affection from beginning to end. Anything is better than

this; and yet the very highest schools _do_ the same thing, or nearly

so, but with totally different motives and perceptions, and the result

is divine. On the whole, I conceive that the extremes of good and evil

lie with the finishers, and that whatever glorious power we may admit in

men like Tintoret, whatever attractiveness of method to Rubens,

Rembrandt, or, though in far less degree, our own Reynolds, still the

thoroughly great men are those who have done everything thoroughly, and

who, in a word, have never despised anything, however small, of God's

making. And this is the chief fault of our English landscapists, that

they have not the intense all-observing penetration of well-balanced

mind; they have not, except in one or two instances, anything of that

feeling which Wordsworth shows in the following lines:--

"So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive;--

Would that the little flowers were born to live

Conscious of half the pleasure which they give.

That to this mountain daisy's self were known

_The beauty of its star-shaped shadow, thrown

On the smooth surface of this naked stone._"

That is a little bit of good, downright, foreground painting--no mistake

about it; daisy, and shadow, and stone texture and all. Our painters

must come to this before they have done their duty; and yet, on the

other hand, let them beware of finishing, for the sake of finish, all

over their picture. The ground is not to be all over daisies, nor is

every daisy to have its star-shaped shadow; there is as much finish in

the right concealment of things as in the right exhibition of them; and

while I demand this amount of specific character where nature shows it,

I demand equal fidelity to her where she conceals it. To paint mist

rightly, space rightly, and light rightly, it may be often necessary to

paint nothing else rightly, but the rule is simple for all that; if the

artist is painting something that he knows and loves, as he knows it

because he loves it, whether it be the fair strawberry of Cima, or the

clear sky of Francia, or the blazing incomprehensible mist of Turner, he

is all right; but the moment he does anything as he thinks it ought to

be, because he does not care about it, he is all wrong. He has only to

ask himself whether he cares for anything except himself; so far as he

does he will make a good picture; so far as he thinks of himself a vile

one. This is the root of the viciousness of the whole French school.

Industry they have, learning they have, power they have, feeling they

have, yet not so much feeling as ever to force them to forget themselves

even for a moment; the ruling motive is invariably vanity, and the

picture therefore an abortion.

Sec. 11. The open skies of the religious schools, how valuable. Mountain

drawing of Masaccio. Landscape of the Bellinis and Giorgione.

Returning to the pictures of the religious schools, we find that their

open skies are also of the highest value. Their preciousness is such

that no subsequent schools can by comparison be said to have painted sky

at all, but only clouds, or mist, or blue canopies. The golden sky of

Marco Basaiti in the Academy of Venice altogether overpowers and renders

valueless that of Titian beside it. Those of Francia in the gallery of

Bologna are even more wonderful, because cooler in tone and behind

figures in full light. The touches of white light in the horizon of

Angelico's Last Judgment are felt and wrought with equal truth. The

dignified and simple forms of cloud in repose are often by these

painters sublimely expressed, but of changeful cloud form they show no

examples. The architecture, mountains, and water of these distances are

commonly conventional; motives are to be found in them of the highest

beauty, and especially remarkable for quantity and meaning of incident;

but they can only be studied or accepted in the particular feeling that

produced them. It may generally be observed that whatever has been the

result of strong emotion is ill seen unless through the medium of such

emotion, and will lead to conclusions utterly false and perilous, if it

be made a subject of cold-hearted observance, or an object of systematic

imitation. One piece of genuine mountain drawing, however, occurs in the

landscape of Masaccio's Tribute Money. It is impossible to say what

strange results might have taken place in this particular field of art,

or how suddenly a great school of landscape might have arisen, had the

life of this great painter been prolonged. Of this particular fresco I

shall have much to say hereafter. The two brothers Bellini gave a marked

and vigorous impulse to the landscape of Venice, of Gentile's

architecture I shall speak presently. Giovanni's, though in style less

interesting and in place less prominent, occurring chiefly as a kind of

frame to his pictures, connecting them with the architecture of the

churches for which they were intended, is in refinement of realization,

I suppose, quite unrivalled, especially in passages requiring pure

gradation, as the hollows of vaultings. That of Veronese would look

ghostly beside it; that of Titian lightless. His landscape is

occasionally quaint and strange like Giorgione's, and as fine in color,

as that behind the Madonna in the Brera gallery at Milan; but a more

truthful fragment occurs in the picture in San Francesco della Vigna at

Venice; and in the picture of St. Jerome in the church of San

Grisostomo, the landscape is as perfect and beautiful as any background

may legitimately be, and finer, as far as it goes, than anything of

Titian's. It is remarkable for the absolute truth of its sky, whose

blue, clear as crystal, and though deep in tone bright as the open air,

is gradated to the horizon with a cautiousness and finish almost

inconceivable; and to obtain light at the horizon without contradicting

the system of chiaroscuro adopted in the figures which are lighted from

the right hand, it is barred across with some glowing white cirri which,

in their turn, are opposed by a single dark horizontal line of lower

cloud; and to throw the whole farther back, there is a wreath of rain

cloud of warmer color floating above the mountains, lighted on its under

edge, whose faithfulness to nature, both in hue and in its light and

shattering form, is altogether exemplary; the wandering of the light

among the hills is equally studied, and the whole is crowned by the

grand realization of the leaves of the fig-tree alluded to (Vol. II.

Part III. Chap. 5,) as well as of the herbage upon the rocks.

Considering that with all this care and completeness in the background,

there is nothing that is not of meaning and necessity in reference to

the figures, and that in the figures themselves the dignity and

heavenliness of the highest religious painters are combined with a force

and purity of color, greater I think than Titian's, it is a work which

may be set before the young artist as in every respect a nearly

faultless guide. Giorgione's landscape is inventive and solemn, but

owing to the rarity even of his nominal works I dare not speak of it in

general terms. It is certainly conventional, and is rather, I imagine,

to be studied for its color and its motives than its details.

Sec. 12. Landscape of Titian and Tintoret.

Of Titian and Tintoret I have spoken already. The latter is every way

the greater master, never indulging in the exaggerated color of Titian,

and attaining far more perfect light; his grasp of nature is more

extensive, and his view of her more imaginative, (incidental notices of

his landscape will be found in the chapter on Imagination penetrative,

of the second volume,) but he is usually too impatient to carry his

thoughts as far out, or to realize with as much substantiality as

Titian. In the St. Jerome of the latter in the gallery of the Brera,

there is a superb example of the modes in which the objects of landscape

may be either suggested or elaborated according to their place and

claim. The larger features of the ground, foliage, and drapery, as well

as the lion in the lower angle, are executed with a slightness which

admits not of close examination, and which, if not in shade, would be

offensive to the generality of observers. But on the rock above the

lion, where it turns towards the light, and where the eye is intended to

dwell, there is a wreath of ivy of which every leaf is separately drawn

with the greatest accuracy and care, and beside it a lizard, studied

with equal earnestness, yet always with that right grandeur of manner to

which I have alluded in the preface. Tintoret seldom reaches or attempts

the elaboration in substance and color of these objects, but he is even

more truth-telling and certain in his rendering of all the great

characters of specific form, and as the painter of Space he stands

altogether alone among dead masters; being the first who introduced the

slightness and confusion of touch which are expressive of the effects of

luminous objects seen through large spaces of air, and the principles of

aerial color which have been since carried out in other fields by

Turner. I conceive him to be the most powerful painter whom the world

has seen, and that he was prevented from being also the most perfect,

partly by untoward circumstances in his position and education, partly

by the very fulness and impetuosity of his own mind, partly by the want

of religious feeling and its accompanying perception of beauty; for his

noble treatment of religious subject, of which I have given several

examples in the third part, appears to be the result only of that grasp

which a great and well-toned intellect necessarily takes of any subject

submitted to it, and is wanting in the signs of the more withdrawn and

sacred sympathies.

But whatever advances were made by Tintoret in modes of artistical

treatment, he cannot be considered as having enlarged the sphere of

landscape conception. He took no cognizance even of the materials and

motives, so singularly rich in color, which were forever around him in

his own Venice. All portions of Venetian scenery introduced by him are

treated conventionally and carelessly; the architectural characters lost

altogether, the sea distinguished from the sky only by a darker green,

while of the sky itself only those forms were employed by him which had

been repeated again and again for centuries, though in less tangibility

and completion. Of mountain scenery he has left, I believe, no example

so far carried as that of John Bellini above instanced.

Sec. 13. Schools of Florence, Milan, and Bologna.

The Florentine and Ambrian schools supply us with no examples of

landscape, except that introduced by their earliest masters, gradually

overwhelmed under renaissance architecture.

Leonardo's landscape has been of unfortunate effect on art, so far as it

has had effect at all. In realization of detail he verges on the

ornamental, in his rock outlines he has all the deficiencies and little

of the feeling of the earlier men. Behind the "Sacrifice for the

Friends" of Giotto at Pisa, there is a sweet piece of rock incident, a

little fountain breaking out at the mountain foot, and trickling away,

its course marked by branches of reeds, the latter formal enough

certainly, and always in triplets, but still with a sense of nature

pervading the whole which is utterly wanting to the rocks of Leonardo in

the Holy Family in the Louvre. The latter are grotesque without being

ideal, and extraordinary without being impressive. The sketch in the

Uffizii of Florence has some fine foliage, and there is of course a

certain virtue in all the work of a man like Leonardo which I would not

depreciate, but our admiration of it in this particular field must be

qualified, and our following cautious.

No advances were made in landscape, so far as I know, after the time of

Tintoret; the power of art ebbed gradually away from the derivative

schools; various degrees of cleverness or feeling being manifested in

more or less brilliant conventionalism. I once supposed there was some

life in the landscape of Domenichino, but in this I must have been

wrong. The man who painted the Madonna del Rosario and Martyrdom of St.

Agnes in the gallery of Bologna, is palpably incapable of doing anything

good, great, or right in any field, way, or kind, whatsoever.[8]

Sec. 14. Claude, Salvator, and the Poussins.

Though, however, at this period the general grasp of the schools was

perpetually contracting, a gift was given to the world by Claude, for

which we are perhaps hardly enough grateful, owing to the very frequency

of our after enjoyment of it. He set the sun in heaven, and was, I

suppose, the first who attempted anything like the realization of actual

sunshine in misty air. He gives the first example of the study of nature

for her own sake, and allowing for the unfortunate circumstances of his

education, and for his evident inferiority of intellect, more could

hardly have been expected from him. His false taste, forced composition,

and ignorant rendering of detail have perhaps been of more detriment to

art than the gift he gave was of advantage. The character of his own

mind is singular; I know of no other instance of a man's working from

nature continually with the desire of being true, and never attaining

the power of drawing so much as a bough of a tree rightly. Salvator, a

man originally endowed with far higher power of mind than Claude, was

altogether unfaithful to his mission, and has left us, I believe, no

gift. Everything that he did is evidently for the sake of exhibiting his

own dexterity; there is no love of any kind for anything; his choice of

landscape features is dictated by no delight in the sublime, but by mere

animal restlessness or ferocity, guided by an imaginative power of which

he could not altogether deprive himself. He has done nothing which

others have not done better, or which it would not have been better not

to have done; in nature, he mistakes distortion for energy, and

savageness for sublimity; in man, mendicity for sanctity, and conspiracy

for heroism.

The landscape of Nicolo Poussin shows much power, and is usually

composed and elaborated on right principles, (compare preface to second

edition,) but I am aware of nothing that it has attained of new or

peculiar excellence; it is a graceful mixture of qualities to be found

in other masters in higher degrees. In finish it is inferior to

Leonardo's, in invention to Giorgione's, in truth to Titian's, in grace

to Raffaelle's. The landscapes of Gaspar have serious feeling and often

valuable and solemn color; virtueless otherwise, they are full of the

most degraded mannerism, and I believe the admiration of them to have

been productive of extensive evil among recent schools.

Sec. 15. German and Flemish landscape.

The development of landscape north of the Alps, presents us with the

same general phases under modifications dependent partly on less

intensity of feeling, partly on diminished availableness of landscape

material. That of the religious painters is treated with the same

affectionate completion; but exuberance of fancy sometimes diminishes

the influence of the imagination, and the absence of the Italian force

of passion admits of more patient and somewhat less intellectual

elaboration. A morbid habit of mind is evident in many, seeming to lose

sight of the balance and relations of things, so as to become intense in

trifles, gloomily minute, as in Albert Durer; and this mingled with a

feverish operation of the fancy, which appears to result from certain

habitual conditions of bodily health rather than of mental culture, (and

of which the sickness without the power is eminently characteristic of

the modern Germans;) but with all this there are virtues of the very

highest order in those schools, and I regret that my knowledge is

insufficient to admit of my giving any detailed account of them.

In the landscape of Rembrandt and Rubens, we have the northern parallel

to the power of the Venetians. Among the etchings and drawings of

Rembrandt, landscape thoughts may be found not unworthy of Titian, and

studies from nature of sublime fidelity; but his system of chiaroscuro

was inconsistent with the gladness, and his peculiar modes of feeling

with the grace, of nature; nor from my present knowledge can I name any

work on canvas in which he has carried out the dignity of his etched

conceptions, or exhibited any perceptiveness of new truths.

Not so Rubens, who perhaps furnishes us with the first instances of

complete unconventional unaffected landscape. His treatment is healthy,

manly, and rational, not very affectionate, yet often condescending to

minute and multitudinous detail; always as far as it goes pure,

forcible, and refreshing, consummate in composition, and marvellous in

color. In the Pitti palace, the best of its two Rubens landscapes has

been placed near a characteristic and highly-finished Titian, the

marriage of St. Catherine. But for the grandeur of line and solemn

feeling in the flock of sheep, and the figures of the latter work, I

doubt if all its glow and depth of tone could support its overcharged

green and blue against the open breezy sunshine of the Fleming. I do not

mean to rank the art of Rubens with that of Titian, but it is always to

be remembered that Titian hardly ever paints sunshine, but a certain

opalescent twilight which has as much of human emotion as of imitative

truth in it,--

"The clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober coloring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality:"

and that art of this kind must always be liable to some appearance of

failure when compared with a less pathetic statement of facts.

It is to be noted, however, that the licenses taken by Rubens in

particular instances are as bold as his general statements are sincere.

In the landscape just instanced the horizon is an oblique line; in the

Sunset of our own gallery many of the shadows fall at right angles to

the light; and in a picture in the Dulwich gallery a rainbow is seen by

the spectator at the side of the sun.

These bold and frank licenses are not to be considered as detracting

from the rank of the painter; they are usually characteristic of those

minds whose grasp of nature is so certain and extensive as to enable

them fearlessly to sacrifice a truth of actuality to a truth of feeling.

Yet the young artist must keep in mind that the painter's greatness

consists not in his taking, but in his atoning for them.

Sec. 16. The lower Dutch schools.

Among the professed landscapists of the Dutch school, we find much

dexterous imitation of certain kinds of nature, remarkable usually for

its persevering rejection of whatever is great, valuable, or affecting

in the object studied. Where, however, they show real desire to paint

what they saw as far as they saw it, there is of course much in them

that is instructive, as in Cuyp and in the etchings of Waterloo, which

have even very sweet and genuine feeling; and so in some of their

architectural painters. But the object of the great body of them is

merely to display manual dexterities of one kind or another, and their

effect on the public mind is so totally for evil, that though I do not

deny the advantage an artist of real judgment may derive from the study

of some of them, I conceive the best patronage that any monarch could

possibly bestow upon the arts, would be to collect the whole body of

them into a grand gallery and burn it to the ground.

Sec. 17. English school, Wilson and Gainsborough.

Passing to the English school, we find a connecting link between them

and the Italians formed by Richard Wilson. Had this artist studied under

favorable circumstances, there is evidence of his having possessed power

enough to produce an original picture; but, corrupted by study of the

Poussins, and gathering his materials chiefly in their field, the

district about Rome--a district especially unfavorable, as exhibiting no

pure or healthy nature, but a diseased and overgrown Flora among

half-developed volcanic rocks, loose calcareous concretions, and

mouldering wrecks of buildings--and whose spirit, I conceive, to be

especially opposed to the natural tone of the English mind, his

originality was altogether overpowered, and, though he paints in a manly

way and occasionally reaches exquisite tones of color, as in the small

and very precious picture belonging to Mr. Rogers, and sometimes

manifests some freshness of feeling, as in the Villa of Maecenas of our

National Gallery, yet his pictures are in general mere diluted

adaptations from Poussin and Salvator, without the dignity of the one or

the fire of the other.

Not so Gainsborough, a great name his whether of the English or any

other school. The greatest colorist since Rubens, and the last, I think,

of legitimate colorists; that is to say, of those who were fully

acquainted with the power of their material; pure in his English

feeling, profound in his seriousness, graceful in his gayety, there are

nevertheless certain deductions to be made from his worthiness which yet

I dread to make, because my knowledge of his landscape works is not

extensive enough to justify me in speaking of them decisively; but this

is to be noted of all that I know, that they are rather motives of

feeling and color than earnest studies; that their execution is in some

degree mannered, and always hasty; that they are altogether wanting in

the affectionate detail of which I have already spoken; and that their

color is in some measure dependent on a bituminous brown and

conventional green which have more of science than of truth in them.

These faults may be sufficiently noted in the magnificent picture

presented by him to the Royal Academy, and tested by a comparison of it

with the Turner (Llanberis,) in the same room. Nothing can be more

attractively luminous or aerial than the distance of the Gainsborough,

nothing more bold or inventive than the forms of its crags and the

diffusion of the broad distant light upon them, where a vulgar artist

would have thrown them into dark contrast. But it will be found that the

light of the distance is brought out by a violent exaggeration of the

gloom in the valley; that the forms of the green trees which bear the

chief light are careless and ineffective; that the markings of the crags

are equally hasty; and that no object in the foreground has realization

enough to enable the eye to rest upon it. The Turner, a much feebler

picture in its first impression, and altogether inferior in the quality

and value of its individual hues, will yet be found to the end more

forcible, because unexaggerated; its gloom is moderate and aerial, its

light deep in tone, its color entirely unconventional, and the forms of

its rocks studied with the most devoted care. With Gainsborough

terminates the series of painters connected with the elder schools. By

whom, among those yet living or lately lost, the impulse was first given

to modern landscape, I attempt not to decide. Such questions are rather

invidious than interesting; the particular tone or direction of any

school seems to me always to have resulted rather from certain phases

of national character, limited to particular periods, than from

individual teaching; and, especially among moderns, what has been good

in each master has been commonly original.

Sec. 18. Constable, Calcott.

I have already alluded to the simplicity and earnestness of the mind of

Constable; to its vigorous rupture with school laws, and to its

unfortunate error on the opposite side. Unteachableness seems to have

been a main feature of his character, and there is corresponding want of

veneration in the way he approaches nature herself. His early education

and associations were also against him; they induced in him a morbid

preference of subjects of a low order. I have never seen any work of his

in which there were any signs of his being able to draw, and hence even

the most necessary details are painted by him inefficiently. His works

are also eminently wanting both in rest and refinement, and Fuseli's

jesting compliment is too true; for the showery weather in which the

artist delights, misses alike the majesty of storm and the loveliness of

calm weather: it is great-coat weather, and nothing more. There is

strange want of depth in the mind which has no pleasure in sunbeams but

when piercing painfully through clouds, nor in foliage but when shaken

by the wind, nor in light itself but when flickering, glistening,

restless, and feeble. Yet, with all these deductions, his works are to

be deeply respected as thoroughly original, thoroughly honest, free from

affectation, manly in manner, frequently successful in cool color, and

especially realizing certain motives of English scenery with perhaps as

much affection as such scenery, unless when regarded through media of

feeling derived from higher sources, is calculated to inspire.

On the works of Calcott, high as his reputation stands, I should look

with far less respect; I see not any preference or affection in the

artist; there is no tendency in him with which we can sympathize, nor

does there appear any sign of aspiration, effort, or enjoyment in any

one of his works. He appears to have completed them methodically, to

have been content with them when completed, to have thought them good,

legitimate, regular pictures; perhaps in some respects better than

nature. He painted everything tolerably, and nothing excellently; he

has given us no gift, struck for us no light, and though he has

produced one or two valuable works, of which the finest I know is the

Marine in the possession of Sir J. Swinburne, they will, I believe, in

future have no place among those considered representative of the

English school.

Sec. 19. Peculiar tendency of recent landscape.

Throughout the range of elder art it will be remembered we have found no

instance of the faithful painting of mountain scenery, except in a faded

background of Masaccio's: nothing more than rocky eminences, undulating

hills, or fantastic crags, and even these treated altogether under

typical forms. The more specific study of mountains seems to have

coincided with the most dexterous practice of water-color; but it admits

of doubt whether the choice of subject has been directed by the vehicle,

or whether, as I rather think, the tendency of national feeling has been

followed in the use of the most appropriate means. Something is to be

attributed to the increased demand for slighter works of art, and much

to the sense of the quality of objects now called picturesque, which

appears to be exclusively of modern origin. From what feeling the

character of middle-age architecture and costume arose, or with what

kind of affection their forms were regarded by the inventors, I am

utterly unable to guess; but of this I think we may be assured, that the

natural instinct and child-like wisdom of those days were altogether

different from the modern feeling, which appears to have taken its

origin in the absence of such objects, and to be based rather on the

strangeness of their occurrence than on any real affection for them; and

which is certainly so shallow and ineffective as to be instantly and

always sacrificed by the majority to fashion, comfort, or economy. Yet I

trust that there is a healthy though feeble love of nature mingled with

it, nature pure, separate, felicitous, which is also peculiar to the

moderns; and as signs of this feeling, or ministers to it, I look with

veneration upon many works which, in a technical point of view, are of

minor importance.

Sec. 20. G. Robson, D. Cox. False use of the term "style."

I have been myself indebted for much teaching and more delight to those

of the late G. Robson. Weaknesses there are in them manifold, much bad

drawing, much forced color, much over finish, little of what artists

call composition; but there is thorough affection for the thing drawn;

they are serious and quiet in the highest degree, certain qualities of

atmosphere and texture in them have never been excelled, and certain

facts of mountain scenery never but by them expressed, as, for instance,

the stillness and depth of the mountain tarns, with the reversed imagery

of their darkness signed across by the soft lines of faintly touching

winds; the solemn flush of the brown fern and glowing heath under

evening light; the purple mass of mountains far removed, seen against

clear still twilight. With equal gratitude I look to the drawings of

David Cox, which, in spite of their loose and seemingly careless

execution, are not less serious in their meaning, nor less important in

their truth. I must, however, in reviewing those modern works in which

certain modes of execution are particularly manifested, insist

especially on this general principle, applicable to all times of art;

that what is usually called the style or manner of an artist is, in all

good art, nothing but the best means of getting at the particular truth

which the artist wanted; it is not a mode peculiar to himself of getting

at the same truths as other men, but the _only_ mode of getting the

particular facts he desires, and which mode, if others had desired to

express those facts, they also must have adopted. All habits of

execution persisted in under no such necessity, but because the artist

has invented them, or desires to show his dexterity in them, are utterly

base; for every good painter finds so much difficulty in reaching the

end he sees and desires, that he has no time nor power left for playing

tricks on the road to it; he catches at the easiest and best means he

can get; it is possible that such means may be singular, and then it

will be said that his _style_ is strange; but it is not a style at all,

it is the saying of a particular thing in the only way in which it

possibly can be said. Thus the reed pen outline and peculiar touch of

Prout, which are frequently considered as mere manner, are in fact the

only means of expressing the crumbling character of stone which the

artist loves and desires. That character never has been expressed except

by him, nor will it ever be expressed except by his means. And it is of

the greatest importance to distinguish this kind of necessary and

virtuous manner from the conventional manners very frequent in

derivative schools, and always utterly to be contemned, wherein an

artist, desiring nothing and feeling nothing, executes everything in his

own particular mode, and teaches emulous scholars how to do with

difficulty what might have been done with ease. It is true that there

are sometimes instances in which great masters have employed different

means of getting at the same end, but in these cases their choice has

been always of those which to them appeared the shortest and most

complete; their practice has never been prescribed by affectation or

continued from habit, except so far as must be expected from such

weakness as is common to all men; from hands that necessarily do most

readily what they are most accustomed to do, and minds always liable to

prescribe to the hands that which they can do most readily.

The recollection of this will keep us from being offended with the loose

and blotted handling of David Cox. There is no other means by which his

object could be attained. The looseness, coolness, and moisture of his

herbage; the rustling crumpled freshness of his broad-leaved weeds; the

play of pleasant light across his deep heathered moor or plashing sand;

the melting of fragments of white mist into the dropping blue above; all

this has not been fully recorded except by him, and what there is of

accidental in his mode of reaching it, answers gracefully to the

accidental part of nature herself. Yet he is capable of more than this,

and if he suffers himself uniformly to paint beneath his capability,

that which began in feeling must necessarily end in manner. He paints

too many small pictures, and perhaps has of late permitted his peculiar

execution to be more manifest than is necessary. Of this, he is himself

the best judge. For almost all faults of this kind the public are

answerable, not the painter. I have alluded to one of his grander

works--such as I should wish always to see him paint--in the preface;

another, I think still finer, a red sunset on distant hills, almost

unequalled for truth and power of color, was painted by him several

years ago, and remains, I believe, in his own possession.

Sec. 21. Copley Fielding. Phenomena of distant color.

The deserved popularity of Copley Fielding has rendered it less

necessary for me to allude frequently to his works in the following

pages than it would otherwise have been, more especially as my own

sympathies and enjoyments are so entirely directed in the channel which

his art has taken, that I am afraid of trusting them too far. Yet I

may, perhaps, be permitted to speak of myself so far as I suppose my own

feelings to be representative of those of a class; and I suppose that

there are many who, like myself, at some period of their life have

derived more intense and healthy pleasure from the works of this painter

than of any other whatsoever; healthy, because always based on his

faithful and simple rendering of nature, and that of very lovely and

impressive nature, altogether freed from coarseness, violence, or

vulgarity. Various references to that which he has attained will be

found subsequently: what I am now about to say respecting what he has

_not_ attained, is not in depreciation of what he has accomplished, but

in regret at his suffering powers of a high order to remain in any

measure dormant.

He indulges himself too much in the use of crude color. Pure cobalt,

violent rose, and purple, are of frequent occurrence in his distances;

pure siennas and other browns in his foregrounds, and that not as

expressive of lighted but of local color. The reader will find in the

following chapters that I am no advocate for subdued coloring; but crude

color is not bright color, and there was never a noble or brilliant work

of color yet produced, whose real form did not depend on the subduing of

its tints rather than the elevation of them.

It is perhaps one of the most difficult lessons to learn in art, that

the warm colors of distance, even the most glowing, are subdued by the

air so as in no wise to resemble the same color seen on a foreground

object; so that the rose of sunset on clouds or mountains has a gray in

it which distinguishes it from the rose color of the leaf of a flower;

and the mingling of this gray of distance, without in the slightest

degree taking away the expression of the intense and perfect purity of

the color in and by itself, is perhaps the last attainment of the great

landscape colorist. In the same way the blue of distance, however

intense, is not the blue of a bright blue flower, and it is not

distinguished from it by different texture merely, but by a certain

intermixture and under current of warm color, which is altogether

wanting in many of the blues of Fielding's distances; and so of every

bright distant color; while in foreground where colors may be, and ought

to be, pure, yet that any of them are expressive of light is only to be

felt where there is the accurate fitting of them to their relative

shadows which we find in the works of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret,

Veronese, Turner, and all other great colorists in proportion as they

are so. Of this fitting of light to shadow Fielding is altogether

regardless, so that his foregrounds are constantly assuming the aspect

of overcharged local color instead of sunshine, and his figures and

cattle look transparent.

Sec. 22. Beauty of mountain foreground.

Again, the finishing of Fielding's foregrounds, as regards their

drawing, is minute without accuracy, multitudinous without thought, and

confused without mystery. Where execution is seen to be in measure

accidental, as in Cox, it may be received as representative of what is

accidental in nature; but there is no part of Fielding's foreground that

is accidental; it is evidently worked and reworked, dotted, rubbed, and

finished with great labor, and where the virtue, playfulness, and

freedom of accident are thus removed, one of two virtues must be

substituted for them. Either we must have the deeply studied and

imaginative foreground, of which every part is necessary to every other,

and whose every spark of light is essential to the well-being of the

whole, of which the foregrounds of Turner in the Liber Studiorum are the

most eminent examples I know, or else we must have in some measure the

botanical faithfulness and realization of the early masters. Neither of

these virtues is to be found in Fielding's. Its features, though grouped

with feeling, are yet scattered and inessential. Any one of them might

be altered in many ways without doing harm; there is no proportioned,

necessary, unalterable relation among them; no evidence of invention or

of careful thought, while on the other hand there is no botanical or

geological accuracy, nor any point on which the eye may rest with

thorough contentment in its realization.

It seems strange that to an artist of so quick feeling the details of a

mountain foreground should not prove irresistibly attractive, and entice

him to greater accuracy of study. There is not a fragment of its living

rock, nor a tuft of its heathery herbage, that has not adorable

manifestations of God's working thereupon. The harmonies of color among

the native lichens are better than Titian's; the interwoven bells of

campanula and heather are better than all the arabesques of the Vatican;

they need no improvement, arrangement, nor alteration, nothing but love,

and every combination of them is different from every other, so that a

painter need never repeat himself if he will only be true; yet all these

sources of power have been of late entirely neglected by Fielding; there

is evidence through all his foregrounds of their being mere home

inventions, and like all home inventions they exhibit perpetual

resemblances and repetitions; the painter is evidently embarrassed

without his rutted road in the middle, and his boggy pool at the side,

which pool he has of late painted in hard lines of violent blue: there

is not a stone, even of the nearest and most important, which has its

real lichens upon it, or a studied form or anything more to occupy the

mind than certain variations of dark and light browns. The same faults

must be found with his present painting of foliage, neither the stems

nor leafage being ever studied from nature; and this is the more to be

regretted, because in the earlier works of the artist there was much

admirable drawing, and even yet his power is occasionally developed in

his larger works, as in a Bolton Abbey on canvas, which was,--I cannot

say, exhibited,--but was in the rooms of the Royal Academy in 1843.[9] I

should have made the preceding remarks with more hesitation and

diffidence, but that, from a comparison of works of this kind with the

slighter ornaments of the water-color rooms, it seems evident that the

painter is not unaware of the deficiencies of these latter, and concedes

something of what he would himself desire to what he has found to be the

feeling of a majority of his admirers. This is a dangerous modesty, and

especially so in these days when the judgment of the many is palpably as

artificial as their feeling is cold.

Sec. 23. De Wint.

There is much that is instructive and deserving of high praise in the

sketches of De Wint. Yet it is to be remembered that even the pursuit of

truth, however determined, will have results limited and imperfect when

its chief motive is the pride of being true; and I fear that these

works, sublime as many of them have unquestionably been, testify more

accuracy of eye and experience of color than exercise of thought. Their

truth of effect is often purchased at too great an expense by the loss

of all beauty of form, and of the higher refinements of color;

deficiencies, however, on which I shall not insist, since the value of

the sketches, as far as they go, is great; they have done good service

and set good example, and whatever their failings may be, there is

evidence in them that the painter has always done what he believed to be

right.

Sec. 24. Influence of Engraving. J. D. Harding.

The influence of the masters of whom we have hitherto spoken is confined

to those who have access to their actual works, since the particular

qualities in which they excel, are in no wise to be rendered by the

engraver. Those of whom we have next to speak are known to the public in

a great measure by the help of the engraver; and while their influence

is thus very far extended, their modes of working are perhaps, in some

degree modified by the habitual reference to the future translation into

light and shade; reference which is indeed beneficial in the care it

induces respecting the arrangement of the chiaroscuro and the

explanation of the forms, but which is harmful, so far as it involves a

dependence rather on quantity of picturesque material than on

substantial color or simple treatment, and as it admits of indolent

diminution of size and slightness of execution.

We should not be just to the present works of J. D. Harding unless we

took this influence into account. Some years back none of our artists

realized more laboriously, nor obtained more substantial color and

texture; a large drawing in the possession of B. G. Windus, Esq., of

Tottenham, is of great value as an example of his manner at the period;

a manner not only careful, but earnest, and free from any kind of

affectation. Partly from the habit of making slight and small drawings

for engravers, and partly also, I imagine, from an overstrained seeking

after appearances of dexterity in execution, his drawings have of late

years become both less solid and less complete; not, however, without

attaining certain brilliant qualities in exchange which are very

valuable in the treatment of some of the looser portions of subject. Of

the extended knowledge and various powers of this painter, frequent

instances are noted in the following pages. Neither, perhaps, are

rightly estimated among artists, owing to a certain coldness of

sentiment in his choice of subject, and a continual preference of the

picturesque to the impressive; proved perhaps in nothing so distinctly

as in the little interest usually attached to his skies, which, if

aerial and expressive of space and movement, content him, though

destitute of story, power, or character: an exception must be made in

favor of the very grand sunrise on the Swiss Alps, exhibited in 1844,

wherein the artist's real power was in some measure displayed, though I

am convinced he is still capable of doing far greater things. So in his

foliage he is apt to sacrifice the dignity of his trees to their

wildness, and lose the forest in the copse, neither is he at all

accurate enough in his expression of species or realization of near

portions. These are deficiencies, be it observed, of sentiment, not of

perception, as there are few who equal him in rapidity of seizure of

material truth.

Sec. 25. Samuel Prout. Early painting of architecture, how deficient.

Very extensive influence in modern art must be attributed to the works

of Samuel Prout; and as there are some circumstances belonging to his

treatment of architectural subject which it does not come within the

sphere of the following chapters to examine, I shall endeavor to note

the more important of them here.

Let us glance back for a moment to the architectural drawing of earlier

times. Before the time of the Bellinis at Venice, and of Ghirlandajo at

Florence, I believe there are no examples of anything beyond

conventional representation of architecture, often rich, quaint, and

full of interest, as Memmi's abstract of the Duomo at Florence at S^ta.

Maria Novella; but not to be classed with any genuine efforts at

representation. It is much to be regretted that the power and custom of

introducing well-drawn architecture should have taken place only when

architectural taste had been itself corrupted, and that the architecture

introduced by Bellini, Ghirlandajo, Francia, and the other patient and

powerful workmen of the fifteenth century, is exclusively of the

renaissance styles; while their drawing of it furnishes little that is

of much interest to the architectural draughtsman as such, being always

governed by a reference to its subordinate position, so that all

forceful shadow and play of color are (most justly) surrendered for

quiet and uniform hues of gray and chiaroscuro of extreme simplicity.

Whatever they chose to do they did with consummate grandeur, (note

especially the chiaroscuro of the square window of Ghirlandajo's which

so much delighted Vasari in S^ta. Maria Novella; and the daring

management of a piece of the perspective in the Salutation, opposite

where he has painted a flight of stairs descending in front, though the

picture is twelve feet above the eye); and yet this grandeur, in all

these men, results rather from the general power obtained in their

drawing of the figure than from any definite knowledge respecting the

things introduced in these accessory parts; so that while in some points

it is impossible for any painter to equal these accessories, unless he

were in all respects as great as Ghirlandajo or Bellini, in others it is

possible for him, with far inferior powers, to attain a representation

both more accurate and more interesting.

In order to arrive at the knowledge of these, we must briefly take note

of a few of the modes in which architecture itself is agreeable to the

mind, especially of the influence upon the character of the building

which is to be attributed to the signs of age.

Sec. 26. Effects of age upon buildings, how far desirable.

It is evident, first, that if the design of the building be originally

bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be in signs of antiquity.

All that in this world enlarges the sphere of affection or imagination

is to be reverenced, and all those circumstances enlarge it which

strengthen our memory or quicken our conception of the dead; hence it is

no light sin to destroy anything that is old, more especially because,

even with the aid of all obtainable records of the past, we, the living,

occupy a space of too large importance and interest in our own eyes; we

look upon the world too much as our own, too much as if we had possessed

it and should possess it forever, and forget that it is a mere hostelry,

of which we occupy the apartments for a time, which others better than

we have sojourned in before, who are now where we should desire to be

with them. Fortunately for mankind, as some counterbalance to that

wretched love of novelty which originates in selfishness, shallowness,

and conceit, and which especially characterizes all vulgar minds, there

is set in the deeper places of the heart such affection for the signs of

age that the eye is delighted even by injuries which are the work of

time; not but that there is also real and absolute beauty in the forms

and colors so obtained, for which the original lines of the

architecture, unless they have been very grand indeed, are well

exchanged, so that there is hardly any building so ugly but that it may

be made an agreeable object by such appearances. It would not be easy,

for instance, to find a less pleasing piece of architecture than the

portion of the front of Queen's College, Oxford, which has just been

restored; yet I believe that few persons could have looked with total

indifference on the mouldering and peeled surface of the oolite

limestone previous to its restoration. If, however, the character of the

building consist in minute detail or multitudinous lines, the evil or

good effect of age upon it must depend in great measure on the kind of

art, the material, and the climate. The Parthenon, for instance, would

be injured by any markings which interfered with the contours of its

sculptures; and any lines of extreme purity, or colors of original

harmony and perfection are liable to injury, and are ill exchanged for

mouldering edges or brown weatherstains.

But as all architecture is, or ought to be, meant to be durable, and to

derive part of its glory from its antiquity, all art that is liable to

mortal injury from effects of time is therein out of place, and this is

another reason for the principle I have asserted in the second part,

page 204. I do not at this instant recollect a single instance of any

very fine building which is not improved up to a certain period by all

its signs of age, after which period, like all other human works, it

necessarily declines, its decline being in almost all ages and countries

accelerated by neglect and abuse in its time of beauty, and alteration

or restoration in its time of age.

Thus I conceive that all buildings dependent on color, whether of mosaic

or painting, have their effect improved by the richness of the

subsequent tones of age; for there are few arrangements of color so

perfect but that they are capable of improvement by some softening and

blending of this kind: with mosaic, the improvement may be considered as

proceeding almost so long as the design can be distinctly seen; with

painting, so long as the colors do not change or chip off.

Again, upon all forms of sculptural ornament, the effect of time is

such, that if the design be poor, it will enrich it; if overcharged,

simplify it; if harsh and violent, soften it; if smooth and obscure,

exhibit it; whatever faults it may have are rapidly disguised, whatever

virtue it has still shines and steals out in the mellow light; and this

to such an extent, that the artist is always liable to be tempted to the

drawing of details in old buildings as of extreme beauty, which look

cold and hard in their architectural lines; and I have never yet seen

any restoration or cleaned portion of a building whose effect was not

inferior to the weathered parts, even to those of which the design had

in some parts almost disappeared. On the front of the church of San

Michele at Lucca, the mosaics have fallen out of half the columns, and

lie in weedy ruin beneath; in many, the frost has torn large masses of

the entire coating away, leaving a scarred unsightly surface. Two of the

shafts of the upper star window are eaten entirely away by the sea wind,

the rest have lost their proportions, the edges of the arches are hacked

into deep hollows, and cast indented shadows on the weed-grown wall.

The process has gone too far, and yet I doubt not but that this building

is seen to greater advantage now than when first built, always with

exception of one circumstance, that the French shattered the lower wheel

window, and set up in front of it an escutcheon with "Libertas" upon it,

which abomination of desolation, the Lucchese have not yet had

human-heartedness enough to pull down.

Putting therefore the application of architecture as an accessory out of

the question, and supposing our object to be the exhibition of the most

impressive qualities of the building itself, it is evidently the duty of

the draughtsman to represent it under those conditions, and with that

amount of age-mark upon it which may best exalt and harmonize the

sources of its beauty: this is no pursuit of mere picturesqueness, it is

true following out of the ideal character of the building; nay, far

greater dilapidation than this may in portions be exhibited, for there

are beauties of other kinds, not otherwise attainable, brought out by

advanced dilapidation; but when the artist suffers the mere love of

ruinousness to interfere with his perception of the _art_ of the

building, and substitutes rude fractures and blotting stains for all its

fine chiselling and determined color, he has lost the end of his own

art.

Sec. 27. Effects of light, how necessary to the understanding of detail.

So far of aging; next of effects of light and color. It is, I believe,

hardly enough observed among architects that the same decorations are of

totally different effect according to their position and the time of

day. A moulding which is of value on a building facing south, where it

takes deep shadows from steep sun, may be utterly ineffective if placed

west or east; and a moulding which is chaste and intelligible in shade

on a north side, may be grotesque, vulgar, or confused when it takes

black shadows on the south. Farther, there is a time of day in which

every architectural decoration is seen to best advantage, and certain

times in which its peculiar force and character are best explained; of

these niceties the architect takes little cognizance, as he must in some

sort calculate on the effect of ornament at all times; but to the artist

they are of infinite importance, and especially for this reason, that

there is always much detail on buildings which cannot be drawn as such,

which is too far off, or too minute, and which must consequently be set

down in short-hand of some kind or another; and, as it were, an

abstract, more or less philosophical, made of its general heads. Of the

style of this abstract, of the lightness, confusion, and mystery

necessary in it, I have spoken elsewhere; at present I insist only on

the arrangement and matter of it. All good ornament and all good

architecture are capable of being put into short-hand; that is, each has

a perfect system of parts, principal and subordinate, of which, even

when the complemental details vanish in distance, the system and anatomy

yet remain visible so long as anything is visible; so that the divisions

of a beautiful spire shall be known as beautiful even till their last

line vanishes in blue mist, and the effect of a well-designed moulding

shall be visibly disciplined, harmonious, and inventive, as long as it

is seen to be a moulding at all. Now the power of the artist of marking

this character depends not on his complete knowledge of the design, but

on his experimental knowledge of its salient and bearing parts, and of

the effects of light and shadow, by which their saliency is best told.

He must therefore be prepared, according to his subject, to use light,

steep or level, intense or feeble, and out of the resulting chiaroscuro

select those peculiar and hinging points on which the rest are based,

and by which all else that is essential may be explained.

The thoughtful command of all these circumstances constitutes the real

architectural draughtsman; the habits of executing everything either

under one kind of effect or in one manner, or of using unintelligible

and meaningless abstracts of beautiful designs, are those which must

commonly take the place of it and are the most extensively esteemed.[10]

Sec. 28. Architectural painting of Gentile Bellini and Vittor Carpaccio;

Let us now proceed with our review of those artists who have devoted

themselves more peculiarly to architectural subject.

Foremost among them stand Gentile Bellini and Vittor Carpaccio, to whom

we are indebted for the only existing faithful statements of the

architecture of Old Venice, and who are the only authorities to whom we

can trust in conjecturing the former beauty of those few desecrated

fragments, the last of which are now being rapidly swept away by the

idiocy of modern Venetians.

Nothing can be more careful, nothing more delicately finished, or more

dignified in feeling than the works of both these men; and as

architectural evidence they are the best we could have had, all the

gilded parts being gilt in the picture, so that there can be no mistake

or confusion of them with yellow color or light, and all the frescoes or

mosaics given with the most absolute precision and fidelity. At the same

time they are by no means examples of perfect architectural drawing;

there is little light and shade in them of any kind, and none whatever

of the thoughtful observance of temporary effect of which we have just

been speaking; so that, in rendering the character of the relieved

parts, their solidity, depth, or gloom, the representation fails

altogether, and it is moreover lifeless from its very completion, both

the signs of age and the effects of use and habitation being utterly

rejected; rightly so, indeed, in these instances, (all the architecture

of these painters being in background to religious subject,) but wrongly

so, if we look to the architecture alone. Neither is there anything like

aerial perspective attempted; the employment of actual gold in the

decoration of all the distances, and the entire realization of their

details, as far as is possible on the scale compelled by perspective,

being alone sufficient to prevent this, except in the hands of painters

far more practised in effect than either Gentile or Carpaccio. But with

all these discrepancies, Gentile Bellini's church of St. Mark's is the

best church of St. Mark's that has ever been painted, so far as I know;

and I believe the reconciliation of true aerial perspective and

chiaroscuro with the splendor and dignity obtained by the real gilding

and elaborate detail, is a problem yet to be accomplished. With the help

of the Daguerreotype, and the lessons of color given by the later

Venetians, we ought now to be able to accomplish it, more especially as

the right use of gold has been shown us by the greatest master of effect

whom Venice herself produced, Tintoret, who has employed it with

infinite grace on the steps ascended by the young Madonna, in his large

picture in the church of the Madonna dell' Orto. Perugino uses it also

with singular grace, often employing it for golden light on distant

trees, and continually on the high light of hair, and that without

losing relative distances.

Sec. 29. And of the Venetians generally.

The great group of Venetian painters who brought landscape art, for that

time, to its culminating point, have left, as we have already seen,

little that is instructive in architectural painting. The causes of this

I cannot comprehend, for neither Titian nor Tintoret appears to despise

anything that affords them either variety of form or of color, the

latter especially condescending to very trivial details,--as in the

magnificent carpet painting of the Doge Mocenigo; so that it might have

been expected that in the rich colors of St. Mark's, and the magnificent

and fantastic masses of the Byzantine palaces, they would have found

where-upon to dwell with delighted elaboration. This is, however, never

the case, and although frequently compelled to introduce portions of

Venetian locality in their backgrounds, such portions are always treated

in a most hasty and faithless manner, missing frequently all character

of the building, and never advanced to realization. In Titian's picture

of Faith, the view of Venice below is laid in so rapidly and slightly,

the houses all leaning this way and that, and of no color, the sea a

dead gray green, and the ship-sails mere dashes of the brush, that the

most obscure of Turner's Venices would look substantial beside it; while

in the very picture of Tintoret in which he has dwelt so elaborately on

the carpet, he has substituted a piece of ordinary renaissance

composition for St. Mark's, and in the background has chosen the

Sansovino side of the Piazzetta, treating even that so carelessly as to

lose all the proportion and beauty of its design, and so flimsily that

the line of the distant sea which has been first laid in, is seen

through all the columns. Evidences of magnificent power of course exist

in whatever he touches, but his full power is never turned in this

direction. More space is allowed to his architecture by Paul Veronese,

but it is still entirely suggestive, and would be utterly false except

as a frame or background for figures. The same may be said with respect

to Raffaelle and the Roman school.

Sec. 30. Fresco painting of the Venetian exteriors. Canaletto.

If, however, these men laid architecture little under contribution to

their own art, they made their own art a glorious gift to architecture,

and the walls of Venice, which before, I believe, had received color

only in arabesque patterns, were lighted with human life by Giorgione,

Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese. Of the works of Tintoret and Titian,

nothing now, I believe, remains; two figures of Giorgione's are still

traceable on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, one of which, singularly

uninjured, is seen from far above and below the Rialto, flaming like the

reflection of a sunset. Two figures of Veronese were also traceable till

lately, the head and arms of one still remain, and some glorious

olive-branches which were beside the other; the figure having been

entirely effaced by an inscription in large black letters on a whitewash

tablet which we owe to the somewhat inopportunely expressed enthusiasm

of the inhabitants of the district in favor of their new pastor.[11]

Judging, however, from the rate at which destruction is at present

advancing, and seeing that, in about seven or eight years more, Venice

will have utterly lost every external claim to interest, except that

which attaches to the group of buildings immediately around St. Mark's

place, and to the larger churches, it may be conjectured that the

greater part of her present degradation has taken place, at any rate,

within the last forty years. Let the reader with such scraps of evidence

as may still be gleaned from under the stucco and paint of the Italian

committees of taste, and from among the drawing-room innovations of

English and German residents restore Venice in his imagination to

some resemblance of what she must have been before her fall. Let him,

looking from Lido or Fusina, replace in the forest of towers those of

the hundred and sixty-six churches which the French threw down; let him

sheet her walls with purple and scarlet, overlay her minarets with

gold,[12] cleanse from their pollution those choked canals which are now

the drains of hovels, where they were once vestibules of palaces, and

fill them with gilded barges and bannered ships; finally, let him

withdraw from this scene, already so brilliant, such sadness and stain

as had been set upon it by the declining energies of more than half a

century, and he will see Venice as it was seen by Canaletto; whose

miserable, virtueless, heartless mechanism, accepted as the

representation of such various glory, is, both in its existence and

acceptance, among the most striking signs of the lost sensation and

deadened intellect of the nation at that time; a numbness and darkness

more without hope than that of the grave itself, holding and wearing yet

the sceptre and the crown like the corpses of the Etruscan kings, ready

to sink into ashes at the first unbarring of the door of the sepulchre.

[Illustration: CASA CONTARINI FASAN, VENICE.

From a drawing by Ruskin.]

The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that I know in the whole

range of art. Professing the most servile and mindless imitation, it

imitates nothing but the blackness of the shadows; it gives no one

single architectural ornament, however near, so much form as might

enable us even to guess at its actual one; and this I say not rashly,

for I shall prove it by placing portions of detail accurately copied

from Canaletto side by side with engravings from the Daguerreotype; it

gives the buildings neither their architectural beauty nor their

ancestral dignity, for there is no texture of stone nor character of age

in Canaletto's touch; which is invariably a violent, black, sharp, ruled

penmanlike line, as far removed from the grace of nature as from her

faintness and transparency; and for his truth of color, let the single

fact of his having omitted _all record, whatsoever, of the frescoes_

whose wrecks are still to be found at least on one half of the

unrestored palaces, and, with still less excusableness, all record of

the magnificent colored marbles of many whose greens and purples are

still undimmed upon the Casa Dario, Casa Bianca Capello, and multitudes

besides, speak for him in this respect.

Let it be observed that I find no fault with Canaletto, for his want of

poetry, of feeling, of artistical thoughtfulness in treatment, or of the

various other virtues which he does not so much as profess. He professes

nothing but colored Daguerreotypeism. Let us have it: most precious and

to be revered it would be: let us have fresco where fresco was, and that

copied faithfully; let us have carving where carving is, and that

architecturally true. I have seen Daguerreotypes in which every figure

and rosette, and crack and stain, and fissure are given on a scale of an

inch to Canaletto's three feet. What excuse is there to be offered for

his omitting, on that scale, as I shall hereafter show, all statement of

such ornament whatever? Among the Flemish schools, exquisite imitations

of architecture are found constantly, and that not with Canaletto's

vulgar, black exaggeration of shadow, but in the most pure and silvery

and luminous grays. I have little pleasure in such pictures; but I blame

not those who have more; they are what they profess to be, and they are

wonderful and instructive, and often graceful, and even affecting, but

Canaletto possesses no virtue except that of dexterous imitation of

commonplace light and shade, and perhaps, with the exception of

Salvator, no artist has ever fettered his unfortunate admirers more

securely from all healthy or vigorous perception of truth, or been of

more general detriment to all subsequent schools.

Sec. 31. Expression of the effects of age on architecture by S. Prout.

Neither, however, by the Flemings, nor by any other of the elder

schools, was the effect of age or of human life upon architecture ever

adequately expressed. What ruins they drew looked as if broken down on

purpose, what weeds they put on seemed put on for ornament. Their

domestic buildings had never any domesticity, the people looked out of

their windows evidently to be drawn, or came into the street only to

stand there forever. A peculiar studiousness infected all accident;

bricks fell out methodically, windows opened and shut by rule; stones

were chipped at regular intervals; everything that happened seemed to

have been expected before; and above all, the street had been washed and

the houses dusted expressly to be painted in their best. We owe to

Prout, I believe, the first perception, and certainly the only existing

expression of precisely the characters which were wanting to old art, of

that feeling which results from the influence among the noble lines of

architecture, of the rent and the rust, the fissure, the lichen, and the

weed, and from the writing upon the pages of ancient walls of the

confused hieroglyphics of human history. I suppose, from the deserved

popularity of the artist, that the strange pleasure which I find myself

in the deciphering of these is common to many; the feeling has been

rashly and thoughtlessly contemned as mere love of the picturesque;

there is, as I have above shown, a deeper moral in it, and we owe much,

I am not prepared to say how much, to the artist by whom pre-eminently

it has been excited. For, numerous as have been his imitators, extended

as his influence, and simple as his means and manner, there has yet

appeared nothing at all to equal him; there is _no_ stone drawing, _no_

vitality of architecture like Prout's. I say not this rashly, I have

Mackenzie in my eye and many other capital imitators; and I have

carefully reviewed the Architectural work of the Academicians, often

most accurate and elaborate. I repeat, there is nothing but the work of

Prout which is true, living, or right in its general impression, and

nothing, therefore, so inexhaustibly agreeable. Faults he has, manifold,

easily detected, and much declaimed against by second-rate artists; but

his excellence no one has ever touched, and his lithographic work,

(Sketches in Flanders and Germany,) which was, I believe, the first of

the kind, still remains the most valuable of all, numerous and elaborate

as its various successors have been. The second series (in Italy and

Switzerland) was of less value, the drawings seemed more laborious, and

had less of the life of the original sketches, being also for the most

part of subjects less adapted for the development of the artist's

peculiar powers; but both are fine, and the Brussels, Louvain, Cologne,

and Nuremberg, subjects of the one, together with the Tours, Amboise,

Geneva, and Sion of the other, exhibit substantial qualities of stone

and wood drawing, together with an ideal appreciation of the present

active vital being of the cities, such as nothing else has ever

approached. Their value is much increased by the circumstance of their

being drawn by the artist's own hand upon the stone, and by the

consequent manly recklessness of subordinate parts, (in works of this

kind, be it remembered, much _is_ subordinate,) which is of all

characters of execution the most refreshing. Note the scrawled middle

tint of the wall behind the Gothic well at Ratisbonne, and compare this

manly piece of work with the wretched smoothness of recent lithography.

Let it not be thought that there is any inconsistency between what I say

here and what I have said respecting finish. This piece of dead wall is

as much finished in relation to its _function_ as a wall of

Ghirlandajo's or Leonardo's in relation to theirs, and the refreshing

quality is the same in both, and manifest in _all_ great masters,

without exception, that of the utter regardlessness of the means so that

their end be reached. The same kind of scrawling occurs often in the

shade of Raffaelle.

Sec. 32. His excellent composition and color.

It is not only, however, by his peculiar stone touch nor perception of

human character that he is distinguished. He is the most dexterous of

all our artists in a certain kind of composition. No one can place

figures like him, except Turner. It is one thing to know where a piece

of blue or white is wanted, and another to make the wearer of the blue

apron or white cap come there, and not look as if it were against her

will. Prout's streets are the only streets that are accidentally

crowded, his markets are the only markets where one feels inclined to

get out of the way. With others we feel the figures so right where they

are, that we have no expectation of their going anywhere else, and

approve of the position of the man with the wheelbarrow, without the

slightest fear of his running against our legs. One other merit he has,

far less generally acknowledged than it should be: he is among our most

sunny and substantial colorists. Much conventional color occurs in his

inferior pictures (for he is very unequal) and some in all; but portions

are always to be found of quality so luminous and pure that I have found

these works the only ones capable of bearing juxtaposition with Turner

and Hunt, who invariably destroy everything else that comes within

range of them. His most beautiful tones occur in those drawings in which

there is prevalent and powerful warm gray, his most failing ones in

those of sandy red. On his deficiencies I shall not insist, because I am

not prepared to say how far it is possible for him to avoid them. We

have never seen the reconciliation of the peculiar characters he has

obtained with the accurate following out of architectural detail. With

his present modes of execution, farther fidelity is impossible, nor has

any other mode of execution yet obtained the same results; and though

much is unaccomplished by him in certain subjects, and something of

over-mannerism may be traced in his treatment of others, as especially

in his mode of expressing the decorative parts of Greek or Roman

architecture, yet in his own peculiar Gothic territory, where the spirit

of the subject itself is somewhat rude and grotesque, his abstract of

decoration has more of the spirit of the reality than far more laborious

imitation. The spirit of the Flemish Hotel de Ville and decorated street

architecture has never been even in the slightest degree felt or

conveyed except by him, and by him, to my mind, faultlessly and

absolutely; and though his interpretation of architecture that contains

more refined art in its details is far less satisfactory, still it is

impossible, while walking on his favorite angle of the Piazzetta at

Venice, either to think of any other artist than Prout or _not_ to think

of _him_.

Sec. 33. Modern architectural painting generally. G. Cattermole.

Many other dexterous and agreeable architectural artists we have of

various degrees of merit, but of all of whom, it may be generally said,

that they draw hats, faces, cloaks, and caps much better than Prout, but

figures not so well; that they draw walls and windows but not cities,

mouldings and buttresses but not cathedrals. Joseph Nash's work on the

architecture of the middle ages is, however, valuable, and I suppose

that Haghe's works may be depended on for fidelity. But it appears very

strange that a workman capable of producing the clever drawings he has,

from time to time, sent to the New Society of Painters in Water Colors,

should publish lithographs so conventional, forced, and lifeless.

It is not without hesitation, that I mention a name respecting which

the reader may already have been surprised at my silence, that of G.

Cattermole. There are signs in his works of very peculiar gifts, and

perhaps also of powerful genius; their deficiencies I should willingly

attribute to the advice of ill-judging friends, and to the applause of a

public satisfied with shallow efforts, if brilliant; yet I cannot but

think it one necessary characteristic of all true genius to be misled by

no such false fires. The Antiquarian feeling of Cattermole is pure,

earnest, and natural; and I think his imagination originally vigorous,

certainly his fancy, his grasp of momentary passion considerable, his

sense of action in the human body vivid and ready. But no original

talent, however brilliant, can sustain its energy when the demands upon

it are constant, and all legitimate support and food withdrawn. I do not

recollect in any, even of the most important of Cattermole's works, so

much as a fold of drapery studied out from nature. Violent

conventionalism of light and shade, sketchy forms continually less and

less developed, the walls and the faces drawn with the same stucco

color, alike opaque, and all the shades on flesh, dress, or stone, laid

in with the same arbitrary brown, forever tell the same tale of a mind

wasting its strength and substance in the production of emptiness, and

seeking, by more and more blindly hazarded handling, to conceal the

weakness which the attempt at finish would betray.

This tendency of late, has been painfully visible in his architecture.

Some drawings made several years ago for an annual illustrative of

Scott's works were for the most part pure and finely felt--(though

irrelevant to our present subject, a fall of the Clyde should be

noticed, admirable for breadth and grace of foliage, and for the bold

sweeping of the water, and another subject of which I regret that I can

only judge by the engraving; Glendearg at twilight--the monk Eustace

chased by Christie of the Clint hill--which I think must have been one

of the sweetest pieces of simple Border hill feeling ever painted)--and

about that time his architecture, though always conventionally brown in

the shadows, was generally well drawn, and always powerfully conceived.

Since then, he has been tending gradually through exaggeration to

caricature, and vainly endeavoring to attain by inordinate bulk of

decorated parts, that dignity which is only to be reached by purity of

proportion and majesty of line.

Sec. 34. The evil in an archaeological point of view of misapplied invention

in architectural subject.

It has pained me deeply, to see an artist of so great original power

indulging in childish fantasticism and exaggeration, and substituting

for the serious and subdued work of legitimate imagination, monstre

machicolations and colossal cusps and crockets. While there is so much

beautiful architecture daily in process of destruction around us, I

cannot but think it treason to _imagine_ anything; at least, if we must

have composition, let the design of the artist be such as the architect

would applaud. But it is surely very grievous, that while our idle

artists are helping their vain inventions by the fall of sponges on

soiled paper, glorious buildings with the whole intellect and history of

centuries concentrated in them, are suffered to fall into unrecorded

ruin. A day does not now pass in Italy without the destruction of some

mighty monument; the streets of all her cities echo to the hammer, half

of her fair buildings lie in separate stones about the places of their

foundation; would not time be better spent in telling us the truth about

these perishing remnants of majestic thought, than in perpetuating the

ill-digested fancies of idle hours? It is, I repeat, treason to the

cause of art for any man to invent, unless he invents something better

than has been invented before, or something differing in kind. There is

room enough for invention in the pictorial treatment of what exists.

There is no more honorable exhibition of imaginative power, than in the

selection of such place, choice of such treatment, introduction of such

incident, as may produce a noble picture without deviation from one line

of the actual truth; and such I believe to be, indeed, in the end the

most advantageous, as well as the most modest direction of the

invention, for I recollect no single instance of architectural

composition by any men except such as Leonardo or Veronese, who could

design their architecture thoroughly before they painted it, which has

not a look of inanity and absurdity. The best landscapes and the best

architectural studies have been views; and I would have the artist take

shame to himself in the exact degree in which he finds himself obliged

in the production of his picture to lose any, even of the smallest parts

or most trivial hues which bear a part in the great impression made by

the reality. The difference between the drawing of the architect and

artist[13] ought never to be, as it now commonly is, the difference

between lifeless formality and witless license; it ought to be between

giving the mere lines and measures of a building, and giving those lines

and measures with the impression and soul of it besides. All artists

should be ashamed of themselves when they find they have not the power

of being true; the right wit of drawing is like the right wit of

conversation, not hyperbole, not violence, not frivolity, only well

expressed, laconic truth.

Sec. 35. Works of David Roberts: their fidelity and grace.

Among the members of the Academy, we have at present only one

professedly architectural draughtsman of note, David Roberts, whose

reputation is probably farther extended on the continent than that of

any other of our artists, except Landseer. I am not certain, however,

that I have any reason to congratulate either of my countrymen upon this

their European estimation; for I think it exceedingly probable that in

both instances it is exclusively based on their defects; and in the case

of Mr. Roberts, in particular, there has of late appeared more ground

for it than is altogether desirable in a smoothness and over-finish of

texture which bears dangerous fellowship with the work of our Gallic

neighbors.

The fidelity of intention and honesty of system of Roberts have,

however, always been meritorious; his drawing of architecture is

dependent on no unintelligible lines, or blots, or substituted types:

the main lines of the real design are always there, and its hollowness

and undercuttings given with exquisite feeling; his sense of solidity of

form is very peculiar, leading him to dwell with great delight on the

roundings of edges and angles; his execution is dexterous and delicate,

singularly so in oil, and his sense of chiaroscuro refined. But he has

never done himself justice, and suffers his pictures to fall below the

rank they should assume, by the presence of several marring characters,

which I shall name, because it is perfectly in his power to avoid them.

In looking over the valuable series of drawing of the Holy Land, which

we owe to Mr. Roberts, we cannot but be amazed to find how frequently

it has happened that there was something very white immediately in the

foreground, and something very black exactly behind it. The same thing

happens perpetually with Mr. Roberts's pictures; a white column is

always coming out of a blue mist, or a white stone out of a green pool,

or a white monument out of a brown recess, and the artifice is not

always concealed with dexterity. This is unworthy of so skilful a

composer, and it has destroyed the impressiveness as well as the color

of some of his finest works. It shows a poverty of conception, which

appears to me to arise from a deficient habit of study. It will be

remembered that of the sketches for this work, several times exhibited

in London, every one was executed in the same manner, and with about the

same degree of completion: being all of them accurate records of the

main architectural lines, the shapes of the shadows, and the remnants of

artificial color, obtained, by means of the same grays, throughout, and

of the same yellow (a singularly false and cold though convenient color)

touched upon the lights. As far as they went, nothing could be more

valuable than these sketches, and the public, glancing rapidly at their

general and graceful effects, could hardly form anything like an

estimate of the endurance and determination which must have been

necessary in such a climate to obtain records so patient, entire, and

clear, of details so multitudinous as (especially) the hieroglyphics of

the Egyptian temples; an endurance which perhaps only artists can

estimate, and for which we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Roberts most

difficult to discharge. But if these sketches were all that the artist

brought home, whatever value is to be attached to them as statements of

fact, they are altogether insufficient for the producing of pictures. I

saw among them no single instance of a downright study; of a study in

which the real hues and shades of sky and earth had been honestly

realized or attempted; nor were there, on the other hand, any of those

invaluable-blotted-five-minutes works which record the unity of some

single and magnificent impressions. Hence the pictures which have been

painted from these sketches have been as much alike in their want of

impressiveness as the sketches themselves, and have never borne the

living aspect of the Egyptian light; it has always been impossible to

say whether the red in them (not a pleasant one) was meant for hot

sunshine or for red sandstone--their power has been farther destroyed by

the necessity the artist seems to feel himself under of eking out their

effect by points of bright foreground color, and thus we have been

encumbered with caftans, pipes, scymetars, and black hair, when all that

we wanted was a lizard, or an ibis. It is perhaps owing to this want of

earnestness in study rather than to deficiency of perception, that the

coloring of this artist is commonly untrue. Some time ago when he was

painting Spanish subjects, his habit was to bring out his whites in

relief from transparent bituminous browns, which though not exactly

right in color, were at any rate warm and agreeable; but of late his

color has become cold, waxy, and opaque, and in his deep shades he

sometimes permits himself the use of a violent black which is altogether

unjustifiable. A picture of Roslin Chapel exhibited in 1844, showed this

defect in the recess to which the stairs descend, in an extravagant

degree; and another exhibited in the British Institution, instead of

showing the exquisite crumbling and lichenous texture of the Roslin

stone, was polished to as vapid smoothness as every French historical

picture. The general feebleness of the effect is increased by the

insertion of the figures as violent pieces of local color unaffected by

the light and unblended with the hues around them, and bearing evidence

of having been painted from models or draperies in the dead light of a

room instead of sunshine. On these deficiencies I should not have

remarked, but that by honest and determined painting from and of nature,

it is perfectly in the power of the artist to supply them; and it is

bitterly to be regretted that the accuracy and elegance of his work

should not be aided by that genuineness of hue and effect which can only

be given by the uncompromising effort to paint not a fine picture but an

impressive and known _verity_.

The two artists whose works it remains for us to review, are men who

have presented us with examples of the treatment of every kind of

subject, and among the rest with portions of architecture which the best

of our exclusively architectural draughtsmen could not excel.

Sec. 36. Clarkson Stanfield.

The frequent references made to the works of Clarkson Stanfield

throughout the subsequent pages render it less necessary for me to

speak of him here at any length. He is the leader of the English

Realists, and perhaps among the more remarkable of his characteristics

is the look of common-sense and rationality which his compositions will

always bear when opposed to any kind of affectation. He appears to think

of no other artist. What he has learned, has been from his own

acquaintance with and affection for the steep hills and the deep sea;

and his modes of treatment are alike removed from sketchiness or

incompletion, and from exaggeration or effort. The somewhat over-prosaic

tone of his subjects is rather a condescension to what he supposes to be

public feeling, than a sign of want of feeling in himself; for in some

of his sketches from nature or from fancy, I have seen powers and

perceptions manifested of a far higher order than any that are traceable

in his Academy works, powers which I think him much to be blamed for

checking. The portion of his pictures usually most defective in this

respect is the sky, which is apt to be cold and uninventive, always well

drawn, but with a kind of hesitation in the clouds whether it is to be

fair or foul weather; they having neither the joyfulness of rest, nor

the majesty of storm. Their color is apt also to verge on a morbid

purple, as was eminently the case in the large picture of the wreck on

the coast of Holland exhibited in 1844, a work in which both his powers

and faults were prominently manifested, the picture being full of good

painting, but wanting in its entire appeal. There was no feeling of

wreck about it; and, but for the damage about her bowsprit, it would

have been impossible for a landsman to say whether the hull was meant

for a wreck or a guardship. Nevertheless, it is always to be

recollected, that in subjects of this kind it is probable that much

escapes us in consequence of our want of knowledge, and that to the eye

of the seaman much may be of interest and value which to us appears

cold. At all events, this healthy and rational regard of things is

incomparably preferable to the dramatic absurdities which weaker artists

commit in matters marine; and from copper-colored sunsets on green waves

sixty feet high, with cauliflower breakers, and ninepin rocks; from

drowning on planks, and starving on rafts, and lying naked on beaches,

it is really refreshing to turn to a surge of Stanfield's true salt,

serviceable, unsentimental sea. It would be well, however, if he would

sometimes take a higher flight. The castle of Ischia gave him a grand

subject, and a little more invention in the sky, a little less muddiness

in the rocks, and a little more savageness in the sea, would have made

it an impressive picture; it just misses the sublime, yet is a fine

work, and better engraved than usual by the Art Union.

One fault we cannot but venture to find, even in our own extreme

ignorance, with Mr. Stanfield's boats; they never look weather-beaten.

There is something peculiarly precious in the rusty, dusty,

tar-trickled, fishy, phosphorescent brown of an old boat, and when this

has just dipped under a wave and rises to the sunshine it is enough to

drive Giorgione to despair. I have never seen any effort at this by

Stanfield; his boats always look new painted and clean; witness

especially the one before the ship in the wreck picture above noticed;

and there is some such absence of a right sense of color in other

portions of his subject; even his fishermen have always clean jackets

and unsoiled caps, and his very rocks are lichenless. And, by the way,

this ought to be noted respecting modern painters in general, that they

have not a proper sense of the value of dirt; cottage children never

appear but in fresh got-up caps and aprons, and white-handed beggars

excite compassion in unexceptionable rags. In reality, almost all the

colors of things associated with human life derive something of their

expression and value from the tones of impurity, and so enhance the

value of the entirely pure tints of nature herself. Of Stanfield's rock

and mountain drawing enough will be said hereafter. His foliage is

inferior; his architecture admirably drawn, but commonly wanting in

color. His picture of the Doge's palace at Venice was quite clay-cold

and untrue. Of late he has shown a marvellous predilection for the

realization, even to actually relieved texture, of old worm-eaten wood;

we trust he will not allow such fancies to carry him too far.

Sec. 37. J. M. W. Turner. Force of national feeling in all great painters.

The name I have last to mention is that of J. M. W. Turner. I do not

intend to speak of this artist at present in general terms, because my

constant practice throughout this work is to say, when I speak of an

artist at all, the very truth of what I believe and feel respecting him;

and the truth of what I believe and feel respecting Turner would appear

in this place, unsupported by any proof, mere rhapsody. I shall

therefore here confine myself to a rapid glance at the relations of his

past and present works, and to some notice of what he has failed of

accomplishing: the greater part of the subsequent chapters will be

exclusively devoted to the examination of the new fields over which he

has extended the range of landscape art.

It is a fact more universally acknowledged than enforced or acted upon,

that all great painters, of whatever school, have been great only in

their rendering of what they had seen and felt from early childhood; and

that the greatest among them have been the most frank in acknowledging

this their inability to treat anything successfully but that with which

they had been familiar. The Madonna of Raffaelle was born on the Urbino

mountains, Ghirlandajo's is a Florentine, Bellini's a Venetian; there is

not the slightest effort on the part of any one of these great men to

paint her as a Jewess. It is not the place here to insist farther on a

point so simple and so universally demonstrable. Expression, character,

types of countenance, costume, color, and accessories are with all great

painters whatsoever those of their native land, and that frankly and

entirely, without the slightest attempt at modification; and I assert

fearlessly that it is impossible that it should ever be otherwise, and

that no man ever painted or ever will paint well anything but what he

has early and long seen, early and long felt, and early and long loved.

How far it is possible for the mind of one nation or generation to be

healthily modified and taught by the work of another, I presume not to

determine; but it depends upon whether the energy of the mind which

receives the instruction be sufficient, while it takes out of what it

feeds upon that which is universal and common to all nature, to resist

all warping from national or temporary peculiarities. Nino Pisano got

nothing but good, the modern French nothing but evil, from the study of

the antique; but Nino Pisano had a God and a character. All artists who

have attempted to assume, or in their weakness have been affected by,

the national peculiarities of other times and countries, have instantly,

whatever their original power, fallen to third-rate rank, or fallen

altogether, and have invariably lost their birthright and blessing,

lost their power over the human heart, lost all capability of teaching

or benefiting others. Compare the hybrid classification of Wilson with

the rich English purity of Gainsborough; compare the recent exhibition

of middle-age cartoons for the Houses of Parliament with the works of

Hogarth; compare the sickly modern German imitations of the great

Italians with Albert Durer and Holbein; compare the vile classicality of

Canova and the modern Italians with Mino da Fiesole, Luca della Robbia,

and Andrea del Verrocchio. The manner of Nicolo Poussin is said to be

Greek--it may be so; this only I know, that it is heartless and

profitless. The severity of the rule, however, extends not in full force

to the nationality, but only to the visibility of things; for it is very

possible for an artist of powerful mind to throw himself well into the

feeling of foreign nations of his own time. Thus John Lewis has been

eminently successful in his seizing of Spanish character. Yet it may be

doubted if the seizure be such as Spaniards themselves would

acknowledge; it is probably of the habits of the people more than their

hearts; continued efforts of this kind, especially if their subjects be

varied, assuredly end in failure; Lewis, who seemed so eminently

penetrative in Spain, sent nothing from Italy but complexions and

costumes, and I expect no good from his stay in Egypt. English artists

are usually entirely ruined by residence in Italy, but for this there

are collateral causes which it is not here the place to examine. Be this

as it may, and whatever success may be attained in pictures of slight

and unpretending aim, of genre, as they are called, in the rendering of

foreign character, of this I am certain, that whatever is to be truly

great and affecting must have on it the strong stamp of the native land;

not a law this, but a necessity, from the intense hold on their country

of the affections of all truly great men; all classicality, all

middle-age patent reviving, is utterly vain and absurd; if we are now to

do anything great, good, awful, religious, it must be got out of our own

little island, and out of this year 1846, railroads and all: if a

British painter, I say this in earnest seriousness, cannot make

historical characters out of the British House of Peers, he cannot paint

history; and if he cannot make a Madonna of a British girl of the

nineteenth century, he cannot paint one at all.

Sec. 38. Influence of this feeling on the choice of Landscape subject.

The rule, of course, holds in landscape; yet so far less

authoritatively, that the material nature of all countries and times is

in many points actually, and in all, in principle, the same; so that

feelings educated in Cumberland, may find their food in Switzerland, and

impressions first received among the rocks of Cornwall, be recalled upon

the precipices of Genoa. Add to this actual sameness, the power of every

great mind to possess itself of the spirit of things once presented to

it, and it is evident, that little limitation can be set to the

landscape painter as to the choice of his field; and that the law of

nationality will hold with him only so far as a certain joyfulness and

completion will be by preference found in those parts of his subject

which remind him of his own land. But if he attempt to impress on his

landscapes any other spirit than that he has felt, and to make them

landscapes of other times, it is all over with him, at least, in the

degree in which such reflected moonshine takes place of the genuine

light of the present day.

The reader will at once perceive how much trouble this simple principle

will save both the painter and the critic; it at once sets aside the

whole school of common composition, and exonerates us from the labor of

minutely examining any landscape which has nymphs or philosophers in it.

It is hardly necessary for us to illustrate this principle by any

reference to the works of early landscape painters, as I suppose it is

universally acknowledged with respect to them; Titian being the most

remarkable instance of the influence of the native air on a strong mind,

and Claude, of that of the classical poison on a weak one; but it is

very necessary to keep it in mind in reviewing the works of our great

modern landscape painter.

Sec. 39. Its peculiar manifestation in Turner.

I do not know in what district of England Turner first or longest

studied, but the scenery whose influence I can trace most definitely

throughout his works, varied as they are, is that of Yorkshire. Of all

his drawings, I think, those of the Yorkshire series have the most heart

in them, the most affectionate, simple, unwearied, serious finishing of

truth. There is in them little seeking after effect, but a strong love

of place, little exhibition of the artist's own powers or peculiarities,

but intense appreciation of the smallest local minutiae. These drawings

have unfortunately changed hands frequently, and have been abused and

ill treated by picture dealers and cleaners; the greater number of them,

are now mere wrecks. I name them not as instances, but as proofs of the

artist's study in this district; for the affection to which they owe

their excellence, must have been grounded long years before. It is to be

traced, not only in these drawings of the places themselves, but in the

peculiar love of the painter for rounded forms of hills; not but that he

is right in this on general principles, for I doubt not, that, with his

peculiar feeling for beauty of line, his hills would have been rounded

still, even if he had studied first among the peaks of Cadore; but

rounded to the same extent and with the same delight in their roundness,

they would not have been. It is, I believe, to those broad wooded steeps

and swells of the Yorkshire downs that we in part owe the singular

massiveness that prevails in Turner's mountain drawing, and gives it one

of its chief elements of grandeur. Let the reader open the Liber

Studiorum, and compare the painter's enjoyment of the lines in the Ben

Arthur, with his comparative uncomfortableness among those of the

aiguilles about the Mer de Glace. Great as he is, those peaks would have

been touched very differently by a Savoyard as great as he.

I am in the habit of looking to the Yorkshire drawings, as indicating

one of the culminating points in Turner's career. In these he attained

the highest degree of what he had up to that time attempted, namely,

finish and quantity of form united with expression of atmosphere, and

light without color. His early drawings are singularly instructive in

this definiteness and simplicity of aim. No complicated or brilliant

color is ever thought of in them; they are little more than exquisite

studies in light and shade, very green blues being used for the shadows,

and golden browns for the lights. The difficulty and treachery of color

being thus avoided, the artist was able to bend his whole mind upon the

drawing, and thus to attain such decision, delicacy, and completeness as

have never in any wise been equalled, and as might serve him for a

secure foundation in all after experiments. Of the quantity and

precision of his details, the drawings made for Hakewill's Italy, are

singular examples. The most perfect gem in execution is a little bit on

the Rhine, with reeds in the foreground, in the possession of B. G.

Windus, Esq., of Tottenham; but the Yorkshire drawings seem to be on the

whole the most noble representatives of his art at this period.

About the time of their production, the artist seems to have felt that

he had done either all that could be done, or all that was necessary, in

that manner, and began to reach after something beyond it. The element

of color begins to mingle with his work, and in the first efforts to

reconcile his intense feeling for it with his careful form, several

anomalies begin to be visible, and some unfortunate or uninteresting

works necessarily belong to the period. The England drawings, which are

very characteristic of it, are exceedingly unequal,--some, as the

Oakhampton, Kilgarren, Alnwick, and Llanthony, being among his finest

works; others, as the Windsor from Eton, the Eton College, and the

Bedford, showing coarseness and conventionality.

Sec. 40. The domestic subjects of the Liber Studiorum.

I do not know at what time the painter first went abroad, but among the

earliest of the series of the Liber Studiorum (dates 1808, 1809,) occur

the magnificent Mont St. Gothard, and little Devil's Bridge. Now it is

remarkable that after his acquaintance with this scenery, so congenial

in almost all respects with the energy of his mind, and supplying him

with materials of which in these two subjects, and in the Chartreuse,

and several others afterwards, he showed both his entire appreciation

and command, the proportion of English to foreign subjects should in the

rest of the work be more than two to one; and that those English

subjects should be--many of them--of a kind peculiarly simple, and of

every-day occurrence, such as the Pembury Mill, the Farm Yard

Composition with the White Horse, that with the Cocks and Pigs, Hedging

and Ditching, Watercress Gatherers (scene at Twickenham,) and the

beautiful and solemn rustic subject called a Watermill; and that the

architectural subjects instead of being taken, as might have been

expected of an artist so fond of treating effects of extended space,

from some of the enormous continental masses are almost exclusively

British; Rivaulx, Holy Island, Dumblain, Dunstanborough, Chepstow, St.

Catherine's, Greenwich Hospital, an English Parish Church, a Saxon Ruin,

and an exquisite Reminiscence of the English Lowland Castle in the

pastoral, with the brook, wooden bridge, and wild duck, to all of which

we have nothing foreign to oppose but three slight, ill-considered, and

unsatisfactory subjects, from Basle, Lauffenbourg, and another Swiss

village; and, further, not only is the preponderance of subject British,

but of affection also; for it is strange with what fulness and

completion the home subjects are treated in comparison with the greater

part of the foreign ones. Compare the figures and sheep in the Hedging

and Ditching, and the East Gate Winchelsea, together with the near

leafage, with the puzzled foreground and inappropriate figures of the

Lake of Thun; or the cattle and road of the St. Catherine's Hill, with

the foreground of the Bonneville; or the exquisite figure with the sheaf

of corn, in the Watermill, with the vintages of the Grenoble subject.

In his foliage the same predilections are remarkable. Reminiscences of

English willows by the brooks, and English forest glades mingle even

with the heroic foliage of the Aesacus and Hesperie, and the Cephalus;

into the pine, whether of Switzerland or the glorious Stone, he cannot

enter, or enters at his peril, like Ariel. Those of the Valley of

Chamounix are fine masses, better pines than other people's, but not a

bit like pines for all that; he feels his weakness, and tears them off

the distant mountains with the mercilessness of an avalanche. The Stone

pines of the two Italian compositions are fine in their arrangement, but

they are very pitiful pines; the glory of the Alpine rose he never

touches; he munches chestnuts with no relish; never has learned to like

olives; and, by the vine, we find him in the foreground of the Grenoble

Alps laid utterly and incontrovertibly on his back.

I adduce these evidences of Turner's nationality (and innumerable others

might be given if need were) not as proofs of weakness but of power; not

so much as testifying want of perception in foreign lands, as strong

hold on his own will; for I am sure that no artist who has not this hold

upon his own will ever get good out of any other. Keeping this principle

in mind, it is instructive to observe the depth and solemnity which

Turner's feeling received from the scenery of the continent, the keen

appreciation up to a certain point of all that is locally

characteristic, and the ready seizure for future use of all valuable

material.

Sec. 41. Turner's painting of French and Swiss landscape. The latter

deficient.

Of all foreign countries he has most entirely entered into the spirit of

France; partly because here he found more fellowship of scene with his

own England, partly because an amount of thought which will miss of

Italy or Switzerland, will fathom France; partly because there is in the

French foliage and forms of ground, much that is especially congenial

with his own peculiar choice of form. To what cause it is owing I cannot

tell, nor is it generally allowed or felt; but of the fact I am certain,

that for grace of stem and perfection of form in their transparent

foliage, the French trees are altogether unmatched; and their modes of

grouping and massing are so perfectly and constantly beautiful that I

think of all countries for educating an artist to the perception of

grace, France bears the bell; and that not romantic nor mountainous

France, not the Vosges, nor Auvergne, nor Provence, but lowland France,

Picardy and Normandy, the valleys of the Loire and Seine, and even the

district, so thoughtlessly and mindlessly abused by English travellers,

as uninteresting, traversed between Calais and Dijon; of which there is

not a single valley but is full of the most lovely pictures, nor a mile

from which the artist may not receive instruction; the district

immediately about Sens being perhaps the most valuable from the grandeur

of its lines of poplars and the unimaginable finish and beauty of the

tree forms in the two great avenues without the walls. Of this kind of

beauty Turner was the first to take cognizance, and he still remains the

only, but in himself the sufficient painter of French landscape. One of

the most beautiful examples is the drawing of trees engraved for the

Keepsake, now in the possession of B. G. Windus, Esq.; the drawings made

to illustrate the scenery of the Rivers of France supply instances of

the most varied character.

The artist appears, until very lately, rather to have taken from

Switzerland thoughts and general conceptions of size and of grand form

and effect to be used in his after compositions, than to have attempted

the seizing of its actual character. This was beforehand to be expected

from the utter physical impossibility of rendering certain effects of

Swiss scenery, and the monotony and unmanageableness of others. The

Valley of Chamounix in the collection of Walter Fawkes, Esq., I have

never seen; it has a high reputation; the Hannibal passing the Alps in

its present state exhibits nothing but a heavy shower and a crowd of

people getting wet; another picture in the artist's gallery of a

land-fall is most masterly and interesting, but more daring than

agreeable. The Snowstorm, avalanche, and inundation, is one of his

mightiest works, but the amount of mountain drawing in it is less than

of cloud and effect; the subjects in the Liber Studiorum are on the

whole the most intensely felt, and next to them the vignettes to

Rogers's Poems and Italy. Of some recent drawings of Swiss subject I

shall speak presently.

Sec. 42. His rendering of Italian character still less successful. His

large compositions how failing.

The effect of Italy upon his mind is very puzzling. On the one hand, it

gave him the solemnity and power which are manifested in the historical

compositions of the Liber Studiorum, more especially the Rizpah, the

Cephalus, the scene from the Fairy Queen, and the Aesacus and Hesperie:

on the other, he seems never to have entered thoroughly into the spirit

of Italy, and the materials he obtained there were afterwards but

awkwardly introduced in his large compositions.

Of these there are very few at all worthy of him; none but the Liber

Studiorum subjects are thoroughly great, and these are great because

there is in them the seriousness without the materials of other

countries and times. There is nothing particularly indicative of

Palestine in the Barley Harvest of the Rizpah, nor in those round and

awful trees; only the solemnity of the south in the lifting of the near

burning moon. The rocks of the Jason may be seen in any quarry of

Warwickshire sandstone. Jason himself has not a bit of Greek about

him--he is a simple warrior of no period in particular, nay, I think

there is something of the nineteenth century about his legs. When local

character of this classical kind is attempted, the painter is visibly

cramped: awkward resemblances to Claude testify the want of his usual

forceful originality: in the tenth Plague of Egypt, he makes us think of

Belzoni rather than of Moses; the fifth is a total failure, the pyramids

look like brick-kilns, and the fire running along the ground bears

brotherly resemblance to the burning of manure. The realization of the

tenth plague now in his gallery is finer than the study, but still

uninteresting; and of the large compositions which have much of Italy in

them, the greater part are overwhelmed with quantity and deficient in

emotion. The Crossing the Brook is one of the best of these hybrid

pictures; incomparable in its tree drawing, it yet leaves us doubtful

where we are to look and what we are to feel; it is northern in its

color, southern in its foliage, Italy in its details, and England in its

sensations, without the grandeur of the one, or the healthiness of the

other.

The two Carthages are mere rationalizations of Claude, one of them

excessively bad in color, the other a grand thought, and yet one of the

kind which does no one any good, because everything in it is

reciprocally sacrificed; the foliage is sacrificed to the architecture,

the architecture to the water, the water is neither sea, nor river, nor

lake, nor brook, nor canal, and savors of Regent's Park; the foreground

is uncomfortable ground,--let on building leases. So the Caligula's

Bridge, Temple of Jupiter, Departure of Regulus, Ancient Italy, Cicero's

Villa, and such others, come they from whose hand they may, I class

under the general head of "nonsense pictures." There never can be any

wholesome feeling developed in these preposterous accumulations, and

where the artist's feeling fails, his art follows; so that the worst

possible examples of Turner's color are found in pictures of this class;

in one or two instances he has broken through the conventional rules,

and then is always fine, as in the Hero and Leander; but in general the

picture rises in value as it approaches to a view, as the Fountain of

Fallacy, a piece of rich northern Italy, with some fairy waterworks;

this picture was unrivalled in color once, but is now a mere wreck. So

the Rape of Proserpine, though it is singular that in his Academy

pictures even his simplicity fails of reaching ideality; in this picture

of Proserpine the nature is not the grand nature of all time, it is

indubitably modern,[14] and we are perfectly electrified at anybody's

being carried away in the corner except by people with spiky hats and

carabines. This is traceable to several causes; partly to the want of

any grand specific form, partly to the too evident middle-age character

of the ruins crowning the hills, and to a multiplicity of minor causes

which we cannot at present enter into.

Sec. 43. His views of Italy destroyed by brilliancy and redundant quantity.

Neither in his actual views of Italy has Turner ever caught her true

spirit, except in the little vignettes to Rogers's Poems. The Villa of

Galileo, the nameless composition with stone pines, the several villa

moonlights, and the convent compositions in the Voyage of Columbus, are

altogether exquisite; but this is owing chiefly to their simplicity and

perhaps in some measure to their smallness of size. None of his large

pictures at all equal them; the Bay of Baiae is encumbered with

material, it contains ten times as much as is necessary to a good

picture, and yet is so crude in color as to look unfinished. The

Palestrina is fall of raw white, and has a look of Hampton Court about

its long avenue; the modern Italy is purely English in its near foliage;

it is composed from Tivoli material enriched and arranged most

dexterously, but it has the look of a rich arrangement, and not the

virtue of the real thing. The early Tivoli, a large drawing taken from

below the falls, was as little true, and still less fortunate, the trees

there being altogether affected and artificial. The Florence engraved in

the Keepsake is a glorious drawing, as far as regards the passage with

the bridge and sunlight on the Arno, the Cascine foliage, and distant

plain, and the towers of the fortress on the left; but the details of

the duomo and the city are entirely missed, and with them the majesty of

the whole scene. The vines and melons of the foreground are disorderly,

and its cypresses conventional; in fact, I recollect no instance of

Turner's drawing a cypress except in general terms.

The chief reason of these failures I imagine to be the effort of the

artist to put joyousness and brilliancy of effect upon scenes eminently

pensive, to substitute radiance for serenity of light, and to force the

freedom and breadth of line which he learned to love on English downs

and Highland moors, out of a country dotted by campaniles and square

convents, bristled with cypresses, partitioned by walls, and gone up and

down by steps.

In one of the cities of Italy he had no such difficulties to encounter.

At Venice he found freedom of space, brilliancy of light, variety of

color, massy simplicity of general form; and to Venice we owe many of

the motives in which his highest powers of color have been displayed

after that change in his system of which we must now take note.

Sec. 44. Changes introduced by him in the received system of art.

Among the earlier paintings of Turner, the culminating period, marked by

the Yorkshire series in his drawings, is distinguished by great

solemnity and simplicity of subject, prevalent gloom in light and shade,

and brown in the hue, the drawing manly but careful, the minutiae

sometimes exquisitely delicate. All the finest works of this period are,

I believe, without exception, views, or quiet single thoughts. The

Calder Bridge, belonging to E. Bicknell, Esq., is a most pure and

beautiful example. The Ivy Bridge I imagine to be later, but its rock

foreground is altogether unrivalled and remarkable for its delicacy of

detail; a butterfly is seen settled on one of the large brown stones in

the midst of the torrent. Two paintings of Bonneville, in Savoy, one in

the possession of Abel Allnutt, Esq., the other, and, I think, the

finest, in a collection at Birmingham, show more variety of color than

is usual with him at the period, and are in every respect magnificent

examples. Pictures of this class are of peculiar value, for the larger

compositions of the same period are all poor in color, and most of them

much damaged, but the smaller works have been far finer originally, and

their color seems secure. There is nothing in the range of landscape art

equal to them in their way, but the full character and capacity of the

painter is not in them. Grand as they are in their sobriety, they still

leave much to be desired; there is great heaviness in their shadows, the

material is never thoroughly vanquished, (though this partly for a very

noble reason, that the painter is always thinking of and referring to

nature, and indulges in no artistical conventionalities,) and sometimes

the handling appears feeble. In warmth, lightness, and transparency they

have no chance against Gainsborough; in clear skies and air tone they

are alike unfortunate when they provoke comparison with Claude; and in

force and solemnity they can in no wise stand with the landscape of the

Venetians.

The painter evidently felt that he had farther powers, and pressed

forward into the field where alone they could be brought into play. It

was impossible for him, with all his keen and long-disciplined

perceptions, not to feel that the real color of nature had never been

attempted by any school; and that though conventional representations

had been given by the Venetians of sunlight and twilight, by invariably

rendering the whites golden and the blues green, yet of the actual,

joyous, pure, roseate hues of the external world no record had ever been

given. He saw also that the finish and specific grandeur of nature had

been given, but her fulness, space, and mystery never; and he saw that

the great landscape painters had always sunk the lower middle tints of

nature in extreme shade, bringing the entire melody of color as many

degrees down as their possible light was inferior to nature's; and that

in so doing a gloomy principle had influenced them even in their choice

of subject.

For the conventional color he substituted a pure straightforward

rendering of fact, as far as was in his power; and that not of such fact

as had been before even suggested, but of all that is _most_ brilliant,

beautiful, and inimitable; he went to the cataract for its iris, to the

conflagration for its flames, asked of the sea its intensest azure, of

the sky its clearest gold. For the limited space and defined forms of

elder landscape, he substituted the quantity and the mystery of the

vastest scenes of earth; and for the subdued chiaroscuro he substituted

first a balanced diminution of oppositions throughout the scale, and

afterwards, in one or two instances, attempted the reverse of the old

principle, taking the lowest portion of the scale truly, and merging the

upper part in high light.

Sec. 45. Difficulties of his later manner. Resultant deficiencies.

Innovations so daring and so various could not be introduced without

corresponding peril: the difficulties that lay in his way were more than

any human intellect could altogether surmount. In his time there has

been no one system of color generally approved; every artist has his own

method and his own vehicle; how to do what Gainsborough did, we know

not; much less what Titian; to invent a new system of color can hardly

be expected of those who cannot recover the old. To obtain perfectly

satisfactory results in color under the new conditions introduced by

Turner, would at least have required the exertion of all his energies in

that sole direction. But color has always been only his second object.

The effects of space and form, in which he delights, often require the

employment of means and method totally at variance with those necessary

for the obtaining of pure color. It is physically impossible, for

instance, rightly to draw certain forms of the upper clouds with the

brush; nothing will do it but the pallet knife with loaded white after

the blue ground is prepared. Now it is impossible that a cloud so drawn,

however glazed afterwards, should have the virtue of a thin warm tint of

Titian's, showing the canvas throughout. So it happens continually. Add

to these difficulties, those of the peculiar subjects attempted, and to

these again, all that belong to the altered system of chiaroscuro, and

it is evident that we must not be surprised at finding many deficiencies

or faults in such works, especially in the earlier of them, nor even

suffer ourselves to be withdrawn by the pursuit of what seems censurable

from our devotion to what is mighty.

Notwithstanding, in some chosen examples of pictures of this kind, I

will name three: Juliet and her Nurse; the Old Temeraire, and the Slave

Ship: I do not admit that there are at the time of their first appearing

on the walls of the Royal Academy, any demonstrably avoidable faults. I

do not deny that there may be, nay, that it is likely there are; but

there is no living artist in Europe whose judgment might safely be taken

on the subject, or who could without arrogance affirm of any part of

such a picture, that it was _wrong_; I am perfectly willing to allow,

that the lemon yellow is not properly representative of the yellow of

the sky, that the loading of the color is in many places disagreeable,

that many of the details are drawn with a kind of imperfection different

from what they would have in nature, and that many of the parts fail of

imitation, especially to an uneducated eye. But no living authority is

of weight enough to prove that the virtues of the picture could have

been obtained at a less sacrifice, or that they are not worth the

sacrifice; and though it is perfectly possible that such may be the

case, and that what Turner has done may hereafter in some respects be

done better, I believe myself that these works are at the time of their

first appearing as perfect as those of Phidias or Leonardo; that is to

say, incapable in their way, of any improvement conceivable by human

mind.

Also, it is only by comparison with such that we are authorized to

affirm definite faults in any of his others, for we should have been

bound to speak, at least for the present, with the same modesty

respecting even his worst pictures of this class, had not his more noble

efforts given us canons of criticism.

But, as was beforehand to be expected from the difficulties he grappled

with, Turner is exceedingly unequal; he appears always as a champion in

the thick of fight, sometimes with his foot on his enemies' necks,

sometimes staggered or struck to his knee; once or twice altogether

down. He has failed most frequently, as before noticed, in elaborate

compositions, from redundant quantity; sometimes, like most other men,

from over-care, as very signally in a large and most labored drawing of

Bamborough; sometimes, unaccountably, his eye for color seeming to fail

him for a time, as in a large painting of Rome from the Forum, and in

the Cicero's Villa, Building of Carthage, and the picture of this year

in the British Institution; and sometimes I am sorry to say, criminally,

from taking licenses which he must know to be illegitimate, or indulging

in conventionalities which he does not require.

[Illustration: THE DOGANA, AND SANTA MARIA DELLA SALUTE, VENICE.

From a painting by Turner.]

Sec. 46. Reflection of his very recent works.