come, without selection. The reader can proceed for himself. I may,
however, name a few cases of chiaroscuro more especially deserving of
his study. Scene between Quilleboeuf and Villequier,--Honfleur,--Light
Towers of the Heve,--On the Seine between Mantes and Vernon,--The
Lantern at St. Cloud,--Confluence of Seine and Marne,--Troyes,--the
first and last vignette, and those at pages 36, 63, 95, 184, 192, 203,
of Rogers's poems; the first and second in Campbell, St. Maurice in the
Italy, where note the black stork; Brienne, Skiddaw, Mayburgh, Melrose,
Jedburgh, in the illustrations to Scott, and the vignettes to Milton,
not because these are one whit superior to others of his works, but
because the laws of which we have been speaking are more strikingly
developed in them, and because they have been well engraved. It is
impossible to reason from the larger plates, in which half the
chiaroscuro is totally destroyed by the haggling, blackening, and
"making out" of the engravers.
FOOTNOTES
[22] Compare Sect. II. Chap. II. Sec. 6.
CHAPTER IV.
OF TRUTH OF SPACE:--FIRST AS DEPENDENT ON THE FOCUS OF THE EYE.[23]
Sec. 1. Space is more clearly indicated by the drawing of objects than by
their hue.
In the first chapter of this section I noticed the distinction between
real aerial perspective, and that overcharged contrast of light and
shade by which the old masters obtained their deceptive effect; and I
showed that, though inferior to them in the precise quality or tone of
aerial color, our great modern master is altogether more truthful in the
expression of the proportionate relation of all his distances to one
another. I am now about to examine those modes of expressing space, both
in nature and art by far the most important, which are dependent, not on
the relative hues of objects, but on the _drawing_ of them: by far the
most important, I say, because the most constant and certain; for nature
herself is not always aerial. Local effects are frequent which interrupt
and violate the laws of aerial tone, and induce strange deception in our
ideas of distance. I have often seen the summit of a snowy mountain look
nearer than its base, owing to the perfect clearness of the upper air.
But the _drawing_ of objects, that is to say, the degree in which their
details and parts are distinct or confused, is an unfailing and certain
criterion of their distance; and if this be rightly rendered in a
painting, we shall have genuine truth of space, in spite of many errors
in aerial tone; while, if this be neglected, all space will be
destroyed, whatever dexterity of tint may be employed to conceal the
defective drawing.
Sec. 2. It is impossible to see objects at unequal distances distinctly at
one moment.
First, then, it is to be noticed, that the eye, like any other lens,
must have its focus altered, in order to convey a distinct image of
objects at different distances; so that it is totally impossible to see
distinctly, at the same moment, two objects, one of which is much
farther off than another. Of this, any one may convince himself in an
instant. Look at the bars of your window-frame, so as to get a clear
image of their lines and form, and you cannot, while your eye is fixed
on them, perceive anything but the most indistinct and shadowy images of
whatever objects may be visible beyond. But fix your eyes on those
objects, so as to see them clearly, and though they are just beyond and
apparently beside the window-frame, that frame will only be felt or seen
as a vague, flitting, obscure interruption to whatever is perceived
beyond it. A little attention directed to this fact will convince every
one of its universality, and prove beyond dispute that objects at
unequal distances cannot be seen together, not from the intervention of
air or mist, but from the impossibility of the rays proceeding from
both, converging to the same focus, so that the whole impression, either
of one or the other, must necessarily be confused, indistinct, and
inadequate.
Sec. 3. Especially such as are both comparatively near.
But, be it observed (and I have only to request that whatever I say may
be tested by immediate experiment,) the difference of focus necessary is
greatest within the first five hundred yards, and therefore, though it
is totally impossible to see an object ten yards from the eye, and one a
quarter of a mile beyond it, at the same moment, it is perfectly
possible to see one a quarter of a mile off, and one five miles beyond
it, at the same moment. The consequence of this is, practically, that in
a real landscape, we can see the whole of what would be called the
middle distance and distance together, with facility and clearness; but
while we do so we can see nothing in the foreground beyond a vague and
indistinct arrangement of lines and colors; and that if, on the
contrary, we look at any foreground object, so as to receive a distinct
impression of it, the distance and middle distance become all disorder
and mystery.
Sec. 4. In painting, therefore, either the foreground or distance must be
partially sacrificed.
And therefore, if in a painting our foreground is anything, our distance
must be nothing, and _vice versa_; for if we represent our near and
distant objects as giving both at once that distinct image to the eye,
which we receive in nature from each, when we look at them
separately;[24] and if we distinguish them from each other only by the
air-tone; and indistinctness dependent on positive distance, we violate
one of the most essential principles of nature; we represent that as
seen at once which can only be seen by two separate acts of seeing, and
tell a falsehood as gross as if we had represented four sides of a cubic
object visible together.
Sec. 5. Which not being done by the old masters, they could not express
space.
Sec. 6. But modern artists have succeeded in fully carrying out this
principle.
Sec. 7. Especially of Turner.
Now, to this fact and principle, no landscape painter of the old school,
as far as I remember, ever paid the slightest attention. Finishing their
foregrounds clearly and sharply, and with vigorous impression on the
eye, giving even the leaves of their bushes and grass with perfect edge
and shape, they proceeded into the distance with equal attention to what
they could see of its details--they gave all that the eye can perceive
in a distance, when it is fully and entirely devoted to it, and
therefore, though masters of aerial tone, though employing every
expedient that art could supply to conceal the intersection of lines,
though caricaturing the force and shadow of near objects to throw them
close upon the eye, they _never_ succeeded in truly representing space.
Turner introduced a new era in landscape art, by showing that the
foreground might be sunk for the distance, and that it was possible to
express immediate proximity to the spectator, without giving anything
like completeness to the forms of the near objects. This is not done by
slurred or soft lines, observe, (always the sign of vice in art,) but by
a decisive imperfection, a firm, but partial assertion of form, which
the eye feels indeed to be close home to it, and yet cannot rest upon,
or cling to, nor entirely understand, and from which it is driven away
of necessity, to those parts of distance on which it is intended to
repose. And this principle, originated by Turner, though fully carried
out by him only, has yet been acted on with judgment and success by
several less powerful artists of the English school. Some six years ago,
the brown moorland foregrounds of Copley Fielding were very instructive
in this respect. Not a line in them was made out, not a single object
clearly distinguishable. Wet broad sweeps of the brush, sparkling,
careless, and accidental as nature herself, always truthful as far as
they went, implying knowledge, though not expressing it, suggested
everything, while they represented nothing. But far off into the
mountain distance came the sharp edge and the delicate form; the whole
intention and execution of the picture being guided and exerted where
the great impression of space and size was to be given. The spectator
was compelled to go forward into the waste of hills--there, where the
sun broke wide upon the moor, he must walk and wander--he could not
stumble and hesitate over the near rocks, nor stop to botanize on the
first inches of his path.[25] And the impression of these pictures was
always great and enduring, as it was simple and truthful. I do not know
anything in art which has expressed more completely the force and
feeling of nature in these particular scenes. And it is a farther
illustration[26] of the principle we are insisting upon, that where, as
in some of his later works, he has bestowed more labor on the
foreground, the picture has lost both in space and sublimity. And among
artists in general, who are either not aware of the principle, or fear
to act upon it, (for it requires no small courage, as well as skill, to
treat a foreground with that indistinctness and mystery which they have
been accustomed to consider as characteristic of distance,) the
foreground is not only felt, as every landscape painter will confess, to
be the most embarrassing and unmanageable part of the picture, but, in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, will go near to destroy the effect
of the rest of the composition. Thus Callcott's Trent is severely
injured by the harsh group of foreground figures; and Stanfield very
rarely gets through an Academy picture without destroying much of its
space, by too much determination of near form; while Harding constantly
sacrifices his distance, and compels the spectator to dwell on the
foreground altogether, though indeed, with such foregrounds as he gives
us, we are most happy so to do. But it is in Turner only that we see a
bold and decisive choice of the distance and middle distance, as his
great object of attention; and by him only that the foreground is united
and adapted to it, not by any want of drawing, or coarseness, or
carelessness of execution, but by the most precise and beautiful
indication or suggestion of just so much of even the minutest forms as
the eye can see when its focus is not adapted to them. And herein is
another reason for the vigor and wholeness of the effect of Turner's
works at any distance; while those of almost all other artists are sure
to lose space as soon as we lose sight of the details.
Sec. 8. Justification of the want of drawing in Turner's figures.
And now we see the reason for the singular, and to the ignorant in art,
the offensive execution of Turner's figures. I do not mean to assert
that there is any reason whatsoever, for _bad_ drawing, (though in
landscape it matters exceedingly little;) but that there is both reason
and necessity for that _want_ of drawing which gives even the nearest
figures round balls with four pink spots in them instead of faces, and
four dashes of the brush instead of hands and feet; for it is totally
impossible that if the eye be adapted to receive the rays proceeding
from the utmost distance, and some partial impression from all the
distances, it should be capable of perceiving more of the forms and
features of near figures than Turner gives. And how absolutely necessary
to the faithful representation of space this indecision really is, might
be proved with the utmost ease by any one who had veneration enough for
the artist to sacrifice one of his pictures to his fame; who would take
some one of his works in which the figures were most incomplete, and
have them painted in by any of our delicate and first-rate
figure-painters, absolutely preserving every color and shade of Turner's
group, so as not to lose one atom of the composition, but giving eyes
for the pink spots, and feet for the white ones. Let the picture be so
exhibited in the Academy, and even novices in art would feel at a glance
that its truth of space was gone, that every one of its beauties and
harmonies had undergone decomposition, that it was now a grammatical
solecism, a painting of impossibilities, a thing to torture the eye, and
offend the mind.
FOOTNOTES
[23] I have left this chapter in its original place, because I am
more than ever convinced of the truth of the position advanced in
the 8th paragraph; nor can I at present assign any other cause, than
that here given, for what is there asserted; and yet I cannot but
think that I have allowed far too much influence to a change so
slight as that which we insensibly make in the focus of the eye; and
that the real justification of Turner's practice, with respect to
some of his foregrounds, is to be elsewhere sought. I leave the
subject, therefore, to the reader's consideration.
[24] This incapacity of the eye must not be confounded with its
incapability to comprehend a large portion of _lateral_ space at
once. We indeed can see, at any one moment, little more than one
point, the objects beside it being confused and indistinct; but we
need pay no attention to this in art, because we can see just as
little of the picture as we can of the landscape without turning the
eye, and hence any slurring or confusing of one part of it,
laterally, more than another, is not founded on any truth of nature,
but is an expedient of the artist--and often an excellent and
desirable one--to make the eye rest where he wishes it. But as the
touch expressive of a distant object is as near upon the canvas as
that expressive of a near one, both are seen distinctly and with the
same focus of the eye, and hence an immediate contradiction of
nature results, unless one or other be given with an artificial and
increased indistinctness, expressive of the appearance peculiar to
the unadapted focus. On the other hand, it must be noted that the
greater part of the effect above described is consequent not on
variation of focus, but on the different angle at which near objects
are seen by each of the two eyes, when both are directed towards the
distance.
[25] There is no inconsistency, observe, between this passage and
what was before asserted respecting the necessity of botanical
fidelity--where the foreground is the object of attention. Compare
Part II. Sect. I. Chap. VII. Sec. 10:--"To paint mist rightly, space
rightly, and light rightly, it may be often necessary to paint
_nothing else_ rightly."
[26] Hardly. It would have been so only had the recently finished
foregrounds been as accurate in detail as they are abundant: they
are painful, I believe, not from their finish, but their falseness.
CHAPTER V.
OF TRUTH OF SPACE:--SECONDLY, AS ITS APPEARANCE IS DEPENDENT ON
THE POWER OF THE EYE.
Sec. 1. The peculiar indistinctness dependent on the retirement of objects
from the eye.
In the last chapter, we have seen how indistinctness of individual
distances becomes necessary in order to express the adaptation of the
eye to one or other of them; we have now to examine that kind of
indistinctness which is dependent on real retirement of the object even
when the focus of the eye is fully concentrated upon it. The first kind
of indecision is that which belongs to all objects which the eye is not
adapted to, whether near or far off: the second is that consequent upon
the want of power in the eye to receive a clear image of objects at a
great distance from it, however attentively it may regard them.
Draw on a piece of white paper, a square and a circle, each about a
twelfth or eighth of an inch in diameter, and blacken them so that their
forms may be very distinct; place your paper against the wall at the end
of the room, and retire from it a greater or less distance according as
you have drawn the figures larger or smaller. You will come to a point
where, though you can see both the spots with perfect plainness, you
cannot tell which is the square and which the circle.
Sec. 2. Causes confusion, but not annihilation of details.
Now this takes place of course with every object in a landscape, in
proportion to its distance and size. The definite forms of the leaves of
a tree, however sharply and separately they may appear to come against
the sky, are quite indistinguishable at fifty yards off, and the form of
everything becomes confused before we finally lose sight of it. Now if
the character of an object, say the front of a house, be explained by a
variety of forms in it, as the shadows in the tops of the windows, the
lines of the architraves, the seams of the masonry, etc.; these lesser
details, as the object falls into distance, become confused and
undecided, each of them losing their definite forms, but all being
perfectly visible as something, a white or a dark spot or stroke, not
lost sight of, observe, but yet so seen that we cannot tell what they
are. As the distance increases, the confusion becomes greater, until at
last the whole front of the house becomes merely a flat, pale space, in
which, however, there is still observable a kind of richness and
checkering, caused by the details in it, which, though totally merged
and lost in the mass, have still an influence on the texture of that
mass; until at last the whole house itself becomes a mere light or dark
spot which we can plainly see, but cannot tell what it is, nor
distinguish it from a stone or any other object.
Sec. 3. Instances in various objects.
Now what I particularly wish to insist upon, is the state of vision in
which all the details of an object are seen, and yet seen in such
confusion and disorder that we cannot in the least tell what they are,
or what they mean. It is not mist between us and the object, still less
is it shade, still less is it want of character; it is a confusion, a
mystery, an interfering of undecided lines with each other, not a
diminution of their number; window and door, architrave and frieze, all
are there: it is no cold and vacant mass, it is full and rich and
abundant, and yet you cannot see a single form so as to know what it is.
Observe your friend's face as he is coming up to you; first it is
nothing more than a white spot; now it is a face, but you cannot see the
two eyes, nor the mouth, even as spots; you see a confusion of lines, a
something which you know from experience to be indicative of a face, and
yet you cannot tell how it is so. Now he is nearer, and you can see the
spots for the eyes and mouth, but they are not blank spots neither;
there is detail in them; you cannot see the lips, nor the teeth, nor the
brows, and yet you see more than mere spots; it is a mouth and an eye,
and there is light and sparkle and expression in them, but nothing
distinct. Now he is nearer still, and you can see that he is like your
friend, but you cannot tell whether he is or not; there is a vagueness
and indecision of line still. Now you are sure, but even yet there are a
thousand things in his face which have their effect in inducing the
recognition, but which you cannot see so as to know what they are.
Sec. 4. Two great resultant truths; that nature is never distinct, and
never vacant.
Changes like these, and states of vision corresponding to them, take
place with each and all of the objects of nature, and two great
principles of truth are deducible from their observation. First, place
an object as close to the eye as you like, there is always something in
it which you _cannot_ see, except in the hinted and mysterious manner
above described. You can see the texture of a piece of dress, but you
cannot see the individual threads which compose it, though they are all
felt, and have each of them influence on the eye. Secondly, place an
object as far from the eye as you like, and until it becomes itself a
mere spot, there is always something in it which you _can_ see, though
only in the hinted manner above described. Its shadows and lines and
local colors are not lost sight of as it retires; they get mixed and
indistinguishable, but they are still there, and there is a difference
always perceivable between an object possessing such details and a flat
or vacant space. The grass blades of a meadow a mile off, are so far
discernible that there will be a marked difference between its
appearance and that of a piece of wood painted green. And thus nature is
never distinct and never vacant, she is always mysterious, but always
abundant; you always see something, but you never see all.
And thus arise that exquisite finish and fulness which God has appointed
to be the perpetual source of fresh pleasure to the cultivated and
observant eye,--a finish which no distance can render invisible, and no
nearness comprehensible; which in every stone, every bough, every cloud,
and every wave is multiplied around us, forever presented, and forever
exhaustless. And hence in art, every space or touch in which we can see
everything, or in which we can see nothing, is false. Nothing can be
true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does
not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which
represents nothing.
Sec. 5. Complete violation of both these principles by the old masters.
They are either distinct or vacant.
Now, I would not wish for any more illustrative or marked examples of
the total contradiction of these two great principles, than the
landscape works of the old masters, taken as a body:--the Dutch masters
furnishing the cases of seeing everything, and the Italians of seeing
nothing. The rule with both is indeed the same, differently applied.
"You shall see the bricks in the wall, and be able to count them, or you
shall see nothing but a dead flat;" but the Dutch give you the bricks,
and the Italians the flat. Nature's rule being the precise reverse--"You
shall never be able to count the bricks, but you shall never see a dead
space."
Sec. 6. Instances from Nicholas Poussin.
Take, for instance, the street in the centre of the really great
landscape of Poussin (great in feeling at least) marked 260 in the
Dulwich Gallery. The houses are dead square masses with a light side and
a dark side, and black touches for windows. There is no suggestion of
anything in any of the spaces, the light wall is dead gray, the dark
wall dead gray, and the windows dead black. How differently would nature
have treated us. She would have let us see the Indian corn hanging on
the walls, and the image of the Virgin at the angles, and the sharp,
broken, broad shadows of the tiled eaves, and the deep ribbed tiles with
the doves upon them, and the carved Roman capital built into the wall,
and the white and blue stripes of the mattresses stuffed out of the
windows, and the flapping corners of the mat blinds. All would have been
there; not as such, not like the corn, nor blinds, nor tiles, not to be
comprehended nor understood, but a confusion of yellow and black spots
and strokes, carried far too fine for the eye to follow, microscopic in
its minuteness, and filling every atom and part of space with mystery,
out of which would have arranged itself the general impression of truth
and life.
Sec. 7. From Claude.
Again, take the distant city on the right bank of the river in Claude's
Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, in the National Gallery. I have seen many
cities in my life, and drawn not a few; and I have seen many
fortifications, fancy ones included, which frequently supply us with
very new ideas indeed, especially in matters of proportion; but I do not
remember ever having met with either a city or a fortress _entirely_
composed of round towers of various heights and sizes, all facsimiles of
each other, and absolutely agreeing in the number of battlements. I
have, indeed, some faint recollection of having delineated such an one
in the first page of a spelling-book when I was four years old; but,
somehow or other, the dignity and perfection of the ideal were not
appreciated, and the volume was not considered to be increased in value
by the frontispiece. Without, however, venturing to doubt the entire
sublimity of the same ideal as it occurs in Claude, let us consider how
nature, if she had been fortunate enough to originate so perfect a
conception, would have managed it in its details. Claude has permitted
us to see every battlement, and the first impulse we feel upon looking
at the picture is to count how many there are. Nature would have given
us a peculiar confused roughness of the upper lines, a multitude of
intersections and spots, which we should have known from experience was
indicative of battlements, but which we might as well have thought of
creating as of counting. Claude has given you the walls below in one
dead void of uniform gray. There is nothing to be seen, nor felt, nor
guessed at in it; it is gray paint or gray shade, whichever you may
choose to call it, but it is nothing more. Nature would have let you
see, nay, would have compelled you to see, thousands of spots and lines,
not one to be absolutely understood or accounted for, but yet all
characteristic and different from each other; breaking lights on
shattered stones, vague shadows from waving vegetation, irregular stains
of time and weather, mouldering hollows, sparkling casements--all would
have been there--none, indeed, seen as such, none comprehensible or like
themselves, but all visible; little shadows, and sparkles, and
scratches, making that whole space of color a transparent, palpitating,
various infinity.
Sec. 8. And G. Poussin.
Or take one of Poussin's extreme distances, such as that in the
Sacrifice of Isaac. It is luminous, retiring, delicate and perfect in
tone, and is quite complete enough to deceive and delight the careless
eye to which all distances are alike; nay, it is perfect and masterly,
and absolutely right if we consider it as a sketch,--as a first plan of
a distance, afterwards to be carried out in detail. But we must remember
that all these alternate spaces of gray and gold are not the landscape
itself, but the treatment of it--not its substance, but its light and
shade. They are just what nature would cast over it, and write upon it
with every cloud, but which she would cast in play, and without
carefulness, as matters of the very smallest possible importance. All
her work and her attention would be given to bring out from underneath
this, and through this, the forms and the material character which this
can only be valuable to illustrate, not to conceal. Every one of those
broad spaces she would linger over in protracted delight, teaching you
fresh lessons in every hairsbreadth of it, and pouring her fulness of
invention into it, until the mind lost itself in following her,--now
fringing the dark edge of the shadow with a tufted line of level
forest--now losing it for an instant in a breath of mist--then breaking
it with the white gleaming angle of a narrow brook--then dwelling upon
it again in a gentle, mounded, melting undulation, over the other side
of which she would carry you down into a dusty space of soft, crowded
light, with the hedges, and the paths, and the sprinkled cottages and
scattered trees mixed up and mingled together in one beautiful,
delicate, impenetrable mystery--sparkling and melting, and passing away
into the sky, without one line of distinctness, or one instant of
vacancy.
Sec. 9. The imperative necessity, in landscape painting, of fulness and
finish.
Now it is, indeed, impossible for the painter to follow all this--he
cannot come up to the same degree and order of infinity--but he can give
us a lesser kind of infinity. He has not one-thousandth part of the
space to occupy which nature has; but he can, at least, leave no part of
that space vacant and unprofitable. If nature carries out her minutiae
over miles, he has no excuse for generalizing in inches. And if he will
only give us all he can, if he will give us a fulness as complete and as
mysterious as nature's, we will pardon him for its being the fulness of
a cup instead of an ocean. But we will not pardon him, if, because he
has not the mile to occupy, he will not occupy the inch, and because he
has fewer means at his command, will leave half of those in his power
unexerted. Still less will we pardon him for mistaking the sport of
nature for her labor, and for following her only in her hour of rest,
without observing how she has worked for it. After spending centuries in
raising the forest, and guiding the river, and modelling the mountain,
she exults over her work in buoyancy of spirit, with playful sunbeam and
flying cloud; but the painter must go through the same labor, or he must
not have the same recreation. Let him chisel his rock faithfully, and
tuft his forest delicately, and then we will allow him his freaks of
light and shade, and thank him for them; but we will not be put off with
the play before the lesson--with the adjunct instead of the
essence--with the illustration instead of the fact.
Sec. 10. Breadth is not vacancy.
I am somewhat anticipating my subject here, because I can scarcely help
answering the objections which I know must arise in the minds of most
readers, especially of those who are _partially_ artistical, respecting
"generalization," "breadth," "effect," etc. It were to be wished that
our writers on art would not dwell so frequently on the necessity of
breadth, without explaining what it means; and that we had more constant
reference made to the principle which I can only remember having seen
once clearly explained and insisted on,--that breadth is not vacancy.
Generalization is unity, not destruction of parts; and composition is
not annihilation, but arrangement of materials. The breadth which unites
the truths of nature with her harmonies, is meritorious and beautiful;
but the breadth which annihilates those truths by the million, is not
painting nature, but painting over her. And so the masses which result
from right concords and relations of details, are sublime and
impressive; but the masses which result from the eclipse of details are
contemptible and painful.[27] And we shall show, in following parts of
the work, that distances like those of Poussin are mere meaningless
tricks of clever execution, which, when once discovered, the artist may
repeat over and over again, with mechanical contentment and perfect
satisfaction, both to himself and to his superficial admirers, with no
more exertion of intellect nor awakening of feeling than any tradesman
has in multiplying some ornamental pattern of furniture. Be this as it
may, however, (for we cannot enter upon the discussion of the question
here,) the falsity and imperfection of such distances admit of no
dispute. Beautiful and ideal they may be; true they are not: and in the
same way we might go through every part and portion of the works of the
old masters, showing throughout, either that you have every leaf and
blade of grass staring defiance to the mystery of nature, or that you
have dead spaces of absolute vacuity, equally determined in their
denial of her fulness. And even if we ever find (as here and there, in
their better pictures, we do) changeful passages of agreeable playing
color, or mellow and transparent modulations of mysterious atmosphere,
even here the touches, though satisfactory to the eye, are suggestive of
nothing,--they are characterless,--they have none of the peculiar
expressiveness and meaning by which nature maintains the variety and
interest even of what she most conceals. She always tells a story,
however hintedly and vaguely; each of her touches is different from all
the others; and we feel with every one, that though we cannot tell what
it is, it cannot be _anything_; while even the most dexterous distances
of the old masters pretend to secrecy without having anything to
conceal, and are ambiguous, not from the concentration of meaning, but
from the want of it.
Sec. 11. The fulness and mystery of Turner's distances.
And now, take up one of Turner's distances, it matters not which, or of
what kind,--drawing or painting, small or great, done thirty years ago,
or for last year's Academy, as you like; say that of the Mercury and
Argus, and look if every fact which I have just been pointing out in
nature be not carried out in it. Abundant, beyond the power of the eye
to embrace or follow, vast and various, beyond the power of the mind to
comprehend, there is yet not one atom in its whole extent and mass which
does not suggest more than it represents; nor does it suggest vaguely,
but in such a manner as to prove that the conception of each individual
inch of that distance is absolutely clear and complete in the master's
mind, a separate picture fully worked out: but yet, clearly and fully as
the idea is formed, just so much of it is given, and no more, as nature
would have allowed us to feel or see; just so much as would enable a
spectator of experience and knowledge to understand almost every minute
fragment of separate detail, but appears, to the unpractised and
careless eye, just what a distance of nature's own would appear, an
unintelligible mass. Not one line out of the millions there is without
meaning, yet there is not one which is not affected and disguised by the
dazzle and indecision of distance. No form is made out, and yet no form
is unknown.
Sec. 12. Farther illustrations in architectural drawing.
Perhaps the truth of this system of drawing is better to be understood
by observing the distant character of rich architecture, than of any
other object. Go to the top of Highgate Hill on a clear summer morning
at five o'clock, and look at Westminster Abbey. You will receive an
impression of a building enriched with multitudinous vertical lines. Try
to distinguish one of those lines all the way down from the one next to
it: You cannot. Try to count them: You cannot. Try to make out the
beginning or end of any one of them: You cannot. Look at it generally,
and it is all symmetry and arrangement. Look at in its parts, and it is
all inextricable confusion. Am not I, at this moment, describing a piece
of Turner's drawing, with the same words by which I describe nature? And
what would one of the old masters have done with such a building as this
in his distance? Either he would only have given the shadows of the
buttresses, and the light and dark sides of the two towers, and two dots
for the windows; or if more ignorant and more ambitious, he had
attempted to render some of the detail, it would have been done by
distinct lines,--would have been broad caricature of the delicate
building, felt at once to be false, ridiculous, and offensive. His most
successful effort would only have given us, through his carefully toned
atmosphere, the effect of a colossal parish church, without one line of
carving on its economic sides. Turner, and Turner only, would follow and
render on the canvas that mystery of decided line,--that distinct,
sharp, visible, but unintelligible and inextricable richness, which,
examined part by part, is to the eye nothing but confusion and defeat,
which, taken as a whole, is all unity, symmetry, and truth.[28]
Sec. 13. In near objects as well as distances.
Sec. 14. Vacancy and falsehood of Canaletto.
Nor is this mode of representation true only with respect to distances.
Every object, however near the eye, has something about it which you
cannot see, and which brings the mystery of distance even into every
part and portion of what we suppose ourselves to see most distinctly.
Stand in the Piazza di St. Marco at Venice, as close to the church as
you can, without losing sight of the top of it. Look at the capitals of
the columns on the second story. You see that they are exquisitely rich,
carved all over. Tell me their patterns: You cannot. Tell me the
direction of a single line in them: You cannot. Yet you see a multitude
of lines, and you have so much feeling of a certain tendency and
arrangement in those lines, that you are quite sure the capitals are
beautiful, and that they are all different from each other. But I defy
you to make out one single line in any one of them. Now go to
Canaletto's painting of this church, in the Palazzo Manfrini, taken from
the very spot on which you stood. How much has he represented of all
this? A black dot under each capital for the shadow, and a yellow one
above it for the light. There is not a vestige nor indication of carving
or decoration of any sort or kind.
Very different from this, but erring on the other side, is the ordinary
drawing of the architect, who gives the principal lines of the design
with delicate clearness and precision, but with no uncertainty or
mystery about them; which mystery being removed, all space and size are
destroyed with it, and we have a drawing of a model, not of a building.
But in the capital lying on the foreground in Turner's Daphne hunting
with Leucippus, we have the perfect truth. Not one jag of the acanthus
leaves is absolutely visible, the lines are all disorder, but you feel
in an instant that all are there. And so it will invariably be found
through every portion of detail in his late and most perfect works.
Sec. 15. Still greater fulness and finish in landscape foregrounds.
But if there be this mystery and inexhaustible finish merely in the more
delicate instances of architectural decoration, how much more in the
ceaseless and incomparable decoration of nature. The detail of a single
weedy bank laughs the carving of ages to scorn. Every leaf and stalk has
a design and tracery upon it,--every knot of grass an intricacy of shade
which the labor of years could never imitate, and which, if such labor
could follow it out even to the last fibres of the leaflets, would yet
be falsely represented, for, as in all other cases brought forward, it
is not clearly seen, but confusedly and mysteriously. That which is
nearness for the bank, is distance for its details; and however near it
may be, the greater part of those details are still a beautiful
incomprehensibility.[29]
Sec. 16. Space and size are destroyed alike by distinctness and by
vacancy.
Hence, throughout the picture, the expression of space and size is
dependent upon obscurity, united with, or rather resultant from,
exceeding fulness. We destroy both space and size, either by the
vacancy, which affords us no measure of space, or by the distinctness,
which gives us a false one. The distance of Poussin, having no
indication of trees, nor of meadows, nor of character of any kind, may
be fifty miles off, or may be five; we cannot tell--we have no measure,
and in consequence, no vivid impression. But a middle distance of
Hobbima's involves a contradiction in terms; it states a distance by
perspective, which it contradicts by distinctness of detail.
Sec. 17. Swift execution best secures perfection of details.
Sec. 18. Finish is far more necessary in landscape than in historical
subjects.
A single dusty roll of Turner's brush is more truly expressive of the
infinity of foliage, than the niggling of Hobbima could have rendered
his canvas, if he had worked on it till doomsday. What Sir J. Reynolds
says of the misplaced labor of his Roman acquaintance on separate leaves
of foliage, and the certainty he expresses that a man who attended to
general character would in five minutes produce a more faithful
representation of a tree, than the unfortunate mechanist in as many
years, is thus perfectly true and well founded; but this is not because
details are undesirable, but because they are best given by swift
execution, and because, individually, they cannot be given at all. But
it should be observed (though we shall be better able to insist upon
this point in future) that much of harm and error has arisen from the
supposition and assertions of swift and brilliant historical painters,
that the same principles of execution are entirely applicable to
landscape, which are right for the figure. The artist who falls into
extreme detail in drawing the human form, is apt to become disgusting
rather than pleasing. It is more agreeable that the general outline and
soft hues of flesh should alone be given, than its hairs, and veins, and
lines of intersection. And even the most rapid and generalizing
expression of the human body, if directed by perfect knowledge, and
rigidly faithful in drawing, will commonly omit very little of what is
agreeable or impressive. But the exclusively generalizing landscape
painter omits the whole of what is valuable in his subject,--omits
thoughts, designs, and beauties by the million, everything, indeed,
which can furnish him with variety or expression. A distance in
Lincolnshire, or in Lombardy, might both be generalized into such blue
and yellow stripes as we see in Poussin; but whatever there is of beauty
or character in either, depends altogether on our understanding the
details, and feeling the difference between the morasses and ditches of
the one, and the rolling sea of mulberry trees of the other. And so in
every part of the subject. I have no hesitation in asserting that it is
_impossible_ to go too fine, or think too much about details in
landscape, so that they be rightly arranged and rightly massed; but that
it is equally impossible to render anything like the fulness or the
space of nature, except by that mystery and obscurity of execution which
she herself uses, and in which Turner only has followed her.
Sec. 19. Recapitulation of the section.
We have now rapidly glanced at such general truths of nature as can be
investigated without much knowledge of what is beautiful. Questions of
arrangement, massing, and generalization, I prefer leaving untouched,
until we know something about details, and something about what is
beautiful. All that is desirable, even in these mere technical and
artificial points, is based upon truths and habits of nature; but we
cannot understand those truths until we are acquainted with the specific
forms and minor details which they affect, or out of which they arise. I
shall, therefore, proceed to examine the invaluable and essential truths
of specific character and form--briefly and imperfectly, indeed, as
needs must be, but yet at length sufficient to enable the reader to
pursue, if he will, the subject for himself.
FOOTNOTES
[27] Of course much depends upon the kind of detail so lost. An
artist may generalize the trunk of a tree, where he only loses lines
of bark, and do us a kindness; but he must not generalize the
details of a champaign, in which there is a history of creation. The
full discussion of the subject belongs to a future part of our
investigation.
[28] Vide, for illustration, Fontainebleau, in the Illustrations to
Scott; Vignette at opening of Human Life, in Rogers's Poems; Venice,
in the Italy; Chateau de Blois; the Rouen, and Pont Neuf, Paris, in
the Rivers of France. The distances of all the Academy pictures of
Venice, especially the Shylock, are most instructive.
[29] It is to be remembered, however, that these truths present
themselves in all probability under very different phases to
individuals of different powers of vision. Many artists who appear
to generalize rudely or rashly are perhaps faithfully endeavoring to
render the appearance which nature bears to sight of limited range.
Others may be led by their singular keenness of sight into
inexpedient detail. Works which are painted for effect at a certain
distance must be always seen at disadvantage by those whose sight is
of different range from the painter's. Another circumstance to which
I ought above to have alluded is the scale of the picture; for there
are different degrees of generalization, and different necessities
of symbolism, belonging to every scale: the stipple of the miniature
painter would be offensive on features of the life size, and the
leaves with Tintoret may articulate on a canvas of sixty feet by
twenty-five, must be generalized by Turner on one of four by three.
Another circumstance of some importance is the assumed distance of
the foreground; many landscape painters seem to think their nearest
foreground is always equally near, whereas its distance from the
spectator varies not a little, being always at least its own
calculable breadth from side to side as estimated by figures or any
other object of known size at the nearest part of it. With Claude
almost always; with Turner often, as in the Daphne and Leucippus,
this breadth is forty or fifty yards; and as the nearest foreground
object _must_ then be at least that distance removed, and _may_ be
much more, it is evident that no completion of close detail is in
such cases allowable, (see here another proof of Claude's erroneous
practice;) with Titian and Tintoret, on the contrary, the foreground
is rarely more than five or six yards broad, and its objects
therefore being only five or six yards distant are entirely
detailed.
None of these circumstances, however, in any wise affect the great
principle, the confusion of detail taking place sooner or later in
all cases. I ought to have noted, however, that many of the pictures
of Turner in which the confused drawing has been least understood,
have been luminous _twilights_; and that the uncertainty of twilight
is therefore added to that of general distance. In the evenings of
the south it not unfrequently happens that objects touched with the
reflected light of the western sky, continue even for the space of
half an hour after sunset, glowing, ruddy, and intense in color, and
almost as bright as if they were still beneath actual sunshine, even
till the moon begins to cast a shadow: but in spite of this
brilliancy of color all the details become ghostly and ill-defined.
This is a favorite moment of Turner's, and he invariably
characterizes it, not by gloom, but by uncertainty of detail. I have
never seen the effect of clear twilight thoroughly rendered by art;
that effect in which all details are lost, while intense clearness
and light are still felt in the atmosphere, in which nothing is
distinctly seen, and yet it is not darkness, far less mist, that is
the cause of concealment. Turner's efforts at rendering this effect
(as the Wilderness of Engedi, Assos, Chateau de Blois,
Caerlaverock, and others innumerable,) have always some slight
appearance of mistiness, owing to the indistinctness of details; but
it remains to be shown that any closer approximation to the effect
is possible.
SECTION III.
OF TRUTH OF SKIES.
CHAPTER I.
OF THE OPEN SKY.
Sec. 1. The peculiar adaptation of the sky to the pleasing and teaching of
man.
Sec. 2. The carelessness with which its lessons are received.
Sec. 3. The most essential of these lessons are the gentlest.
Sec. 4. Many of our ideas of sky altogether conventional.
It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky.
It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of
pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him
and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the
part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other
works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere
pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization; but
every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be
answered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great ugly black rain
cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so
all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and
evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any
day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene,
picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such
exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is
quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual
pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources
of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest
scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended
that man should live always in the midst of them, he injures them by his
presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them; but the sky
is for all; bright as it is, it is not "too bright, nor good, for human
nature's daily food;" it is fitted in all its functions for the
perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and
purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes
capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together;
almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost
divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us, is as
distinct, as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is
mortal is essential. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a
subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we
look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon
all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to
receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we
share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless
and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be worthy of a
moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in our moments of
utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource,
which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says it has been wet, and
another it has been windy, and another it has been warm. Who, among the
whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and the precipices of
the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon
yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and
smote upon their summits until they melted and mouldered away in a dust
of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight
left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like
withered leaves? All has passed, unregretted as unseen; or if the apathy
be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross, or
what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce
manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail,
nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the
sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire,
but in the still small voice. They are but the blunt and the low
faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lampblack
and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive
majesty, the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual,--that which must be
sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood,--things which
the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally, which are
never wanting, and never repeated, which are to be found always yet each
found but once; it is through these that the lesson of devotion is
chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given. These are what the
artist of highest aim must study; it is these, by the combination of
which his ideal is to be created; these, of which so little notice is
ordinarily taken by common observers, that I fully believe, little as
people in general are concerned with art, more of their ideas of sky are
derived from pictures than from reality, and that if we could examine
the conception formed in the minds of most educated persons when we talk
of clouds, it would frequently be found composed of fragments of blue
and white reminiscences of the old masters.
I shall enter upon the examination of what is true in sky at greater
length, because it is the only part of a picture of which all, if they
will, may be competent judges. What I may have to assert respecting the
rocks of Salvator, or the boughs of Claude, I can scarcely prove, except
to those whom I can immure for a month or two in the fastnesses of the
Apennines, or guide in their summer walks again and again through the
ravines of Sorrento. But what I say of the sky can be brought to an
immediate test by all, and I write the more decisively, in the hope that
it may be so.
Sec. 5. Nature and essential qualities of the open blue.
Sec. 6. Its connection with clouds.
Sec. 7. Its exceeding depth.
Sec. 8. These qualities are especially given by modern masters.
Sec. 9. And by Claude.
Sec. 10. Total absence of them in Poussin. Physical errors in his general
treatment of open sky.
Sec. 11. Errors of Cuyp in graduation of color.
Let us begin then with the simple open blue of the sky. This is of
course the color of the pure atmospheric air, not the aqueous vapor, but
the pure azote and oxygen, and it is the total color of the whole mass
of that air between us and the void of space. It is modified by the
varying quantity of aqueous vapor suspended in it, whose color, in its
most imperfect, and therefore most visible, state of solution, is pure
white, (as in steam,) which receives, like any other white, the warm
hues of the rays of the sun, and, according to its quantity and
imperfect solution, makes the sky paler, and at the same time more or
less gray, by mixing warm tones with its blue. This gray aqueous vapor,
when very decided, becomes mist, and when local, cloud. Hence the sky is
to be considered as a transparent blue liquid, in which, at various
elevations, clouds are suspended, those clouds being themselves only
particular visible spaces of a substance with which the whole mass of
this liquid is more or less impregnated. Now, we all know this perfectly
well, and yet we so far forget it in practice, that we little notice the
constant connection kept up by nature between her blue and her clouds,
and we are not offended by the constant habit of the old masters, of
considering the blue sky as totally distinct in its nature, and far
separated from the vapors which float in it. With them, cloud is cloud,
and blue is blue, and no kind of connection between them is ever hinted
at. The sky is thought of as a clear, high material dome, the clouds as
separate bodies, suspended beneath it, and in consequence, however
delicate and exquisitely removed in tone their skies may be, you always
look _at_ them, not _through_ them. Now, if there be one characteristic
of the sky more valuable or necessary to be rendered than another, it is
that which Wordsworth has given in the second book of the Excursion:--
"The chasm of sky above my head
Is Heaven's profoundest azure. No domain
For fickle, short-lived clouds, to occupy,
Or to pass through;--but rather an _abyss_
In which the everlasting stars abide,
And whose soft gloom, and boundless depth, might tempt
The curious eye to look for them by day."
And, in his American Notes, I remember Dickens notices the same truth,
describing himself as lying drowsily on the barge deck, looking not at,
but _through_ the sky. And if you look intensely at the pure blue of a
serene sky, you will see that there is a variety and fulness in its very
repose. It is not flat dead color, but a deep, quivering, transparent
body of penetrable air, in which you trace or imagine short, falling
spots of deceiving light, and dim shades, faint, veiled vestiges of dark
vapor; and it is this trembling transparency which our great modern
master has especially aimed at and given. His blue is never laid on in
smooth coats, but in breaking, mingling, melting hues, a quarter of an
inch of which, cut off from all the rest of the picture, is still
_spacious_, still infinite and immeasurable in depth. It is a painting
of the air, something into which you can see, through the parts which
are near you into those which are far off; something which has no
surface, and through which we can plunge far and farther, and without
stay or end, into the profundity of space;--whereas, with all the old
landscape painters, except Claude, you may indeed go a long way before
you come to the sky, but you will strike hard against it at last. A
perfectly genuine and untouched sky of Claude is indeed most perfect,
and beyond praise, in all qualities of air; though even with him, I
often feel rather that there is a great deal of pleasant air between me
and the firmament, than that the firmament itself is only air. I do not
mean, however, to say a word against such skies as that of the Enchanted
Castle, or that marked 30 in the National Gallery, or one or two which I
remember at Rome; but how little and by how few these fine passages of
Claude are appreciated, is sufficiently proved by the sufferance of such
villainous and unpalliated copies as we meet with all over Europe, like
the Marriage of Isaac, in our own Gallery, to remain under his name. In
fact, I do not remember above ten pictures of Claude's, in which the
skies, whether repainted or altogether copies, or perhaps from Claude's
hand, but carelessly laid in, like that marked 241, Dulwich Gallery,
were not fully as feelingless and false as those of other masters;
while, with the Poussins, there are no favorable exceptions. Their skies
are systematically wrong; take, for instance, the sky of the Sacrifice
of Isaac. It is here high noon, as is shown by the shadow of the
figures; and what sort of color is the sky at the top of the picture? Is
it pale and gray with heat, full of sunshine, and unfathomable in depth?
On the contrary, it is of a pitch of darkness which, except on the Mont
Blanc or Chimborazo, is as purely impossible as color can be. He might
as well have painted it coal black; and it is laid on with a dead coat
of flat paint, having no one quality or resemblance of sky about it. It
cannot have altered, because the land horizon is as delicate and tender
in tone as possible, and is evidently unchanged; and to complete the
absurdity of the whole thing, this color holds its own, without
graduation or alteration, to within three or four degrees of the
horizon, where it suddenly becomes bold and unmixed yellow. Now the
horizon at noon may be yellow when the whole sky is covered with dark
clouds, and only _one_ open streak of light left in the distance from
which the whole light proceeds; but with a clear, open sky, and opposite
the sun, at noon, such a yellow horizon as this is physically
impossible. Even supposing that the upper part of the sky were pale and
warm, and that the transition from the one hue to the other were
effected imperceptibly and gradually, as is invariably the case in
reality, instead of taking place within a space of two or three
degrees;--even then, this gold yellow would be altogether absurd; but as
it is, we have in this sky (and it is a fine picture--one of the best of
Gaspar's that I know,) a notable example of the truth of the old
masters--two impossible colors impossibly united! Find such a color in
Turner's noonday zenith as the blue at the top, or such a color at a
noonday horizon as the yellow at the bottom, or such a connection of any
colors whatsoever as that in the centre, and then you may talk about his
being false to nature if you will. Nor is this a solitary instance; it
is Gaspar Poussin's favorite and characteristic effect. I remember
twenty such, most of them worse than this, in the downright surface and
opacity of blue. Again, look at the large Cuyp in the Dulwich Gallery,
which Mr. Hazlitt considers the "finest in the world," and of which he
very complimentarily says, "The tender green of the valleys, the
gleaming lake, the purple light of the hills, have an effect like the
_down_ on an unripe nectarine!" I ought to have apologized before now,
for not having studied sufficiently in Covent Garden to be provided with
terms of correct and classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to
observe, the other day, that Claude was "pulpy;" another added the yet
more gratifying information that he was "juicy;" and it is now happily
discovered that Cuyp is "downy." Now I dare say that the sky of this
first-rate Cuyp is very like an unripe nectarine: all that I have to say
about it is, that it is exceedingly unlike a sky. The blue remains
unchanged and ungraduated over three-fourths of it, down to the horizon;
while the sun, in the left-hand corner, is surrounded with a halo, first
of yellow, and then of crude pink, both being separated from each other,
and the last from the blue, as sharply as the belts of a rainbow, and
both together not ascending ten degrees in the sky. Now it is difficult
to conceive how any man calling himself a painter could impose such a
thing on the public, and still more how the public can receive it, as a
representation of that sunset purple which invariably extends its
influence to the zenith, so that there is no pure blue anywhere, but a
purple increasing in purity gradually down to its point of greatest
intensity, (about forty-five degrees from the horizon,) and then melting
imperceptibly into the gold, the three colors extending their influence
over the whole sky; so that throughout the whole sweep of the heaven,
there is no one spot where the color is not in an equal state of
transition--passing from gold into orange, from that into rose, from
that into purple, from that into blue, with absolute equality of change,
so that in no place can it be said, "here it changes," and in no place,
"here it is unchanging." This is invariably the case. There is no such
thing--there never was, and never will be such a thing, while God's
heaven remains as it is made--as a serene, sunset sky, with its purple
and rose in _belts_ about the sun.
Sec. 12. The exceeding value of the skies of the early Italian and Dutch
schools. Their qualities are unattainable in modern times.
Such bold, broad examples of ignorance as these would soon set aside all
the claims of the professed landscape painters to truth, with whatever
delicacy of color or manipulation they may be disguised. But there are
some skies, of the Dutch school, in which clearness and coolness have
been aimed at, instead of depth; and some introduced merely as
backgrounds to the historical subjects of the older Italians, which
there is no matching in modern times; one would think angels had painted
them, for all is now clay and oil in comparison. It seems as if we had
totally lost the art, for surely otherwise, however little our painters
might aim at it or feel it, they would touch the chord sometimes by
accident; but they never do, and the mechanical incapacity is still more
strongly evidenced by the muddy struggles of the unhappy Germans, who
have the feeling, partially strained, artificial, and diseased, indeed,
but still genuine enough to bring out the tone, if they had the
mechanical means and technical knowledge. But, however they were
obtained, the clear tones of this kind of the older Italians are
glorious and enviable in the highest degree; and we shall show, when we
come to speak of the beautiful, that they are one of the most just
grounds of the fame of the old masters.
Sec. 13. Phenomena of visible sunbeams. Their nature and cause.
But there is a series of phenomena connected with the open blue of the
sky, which we must take especial notice of, as it is of constant
occurrence in the works of Turner and Claude, the effects, namely, of
visible sunbeams. It will be necessary for us thoroughly to understand
the circumstances under which such effects take place.
Aqueous vapor or mist, suspended in the atmosphere, becomes visible
exactly as dust does in the air of a room. In the shadows you not only
cannot see the dust itself, because unillumined, but you can see other
objects through the dust without obscurity, the air being thus actually
rendered more transparent by a deprivation of light. Where a sunbeam
enters, every particle of dust becomes visible, and a palpable
interruption to the sight, so that a transverse sunbeam is a real
obstacle to the vision, you cannot see things clearly through it.
In the same way, wherever vapor is illuminated by transverse rays, there
it becomes visible as a whiteness more or less affecting the purity of
the blue, and destroying it exactly in proportion to the degree of
illumination. But where vapor is in shade, it has very little effect on
the sky, perhaps making it a little deeper and grayer than it otherwise
would be, but not itself, unless very dense, distinguishable or felt as
mist.
Sec. 14. They are only illuminated mist, and cannot appear when the sky is
free from vapor, nor when it is without clouds.
The appearance of mist or whiteness in the blue of the sky, is thus a
circumstance which more or less accompanies sunshine, and which,
supposing the quantity of vapor constant, is greatest in the brightest
sunlight. When there are no clouds in the sky, the whiteness, as it
affects the whole sky equally, is not particularly noticeable. But when
there are clouds between us and the sun, the sun being low, those clouds
cast shadows along and through the mass of suspended vapor. Within the
space of these shadows, the vapor, as above stated, becomes transparent
and invisible, and the sky appears of a pure blue. But where the
sunbeams strike, the vapor becomes visible in the form of the beams,
occasioning those radiating shafts of light which are one of the most
valuable and constant accompaniments of a low sun. The denser the mist,
the more distinct and sharp-edged will these rays be; when the air is
very clear, they are mere vague, flushing, gradated passages of light;
when it is very thick, they are keen-edged and decisive in a high
degree.
We see then, first, that a quantity of mist dispersed through the whole
space of the sky, is necessary to this phenomenon; and secondly, that
what we usually think of as beams of greater brightness than the rest of
the sky, are in reality only a part of that sky in its natural state of
illumination, cut off and rendered brilliant by the shadows from the
clouds,--that these shadows are in reality the source of the appearance
of beams,--that, therefore, no part of the sky can present such an
appearance, except when there are broken clouds between it and the sun;
and lastly, that the shadows cast from such clouds are not necessarily
gray or dark, but very nearly of the natural pure blue of a sky
destitute of vapor.
Sec. 15. Erroneous tendency in the representation of such phenomena by the
old masters.
Sec. 16. The ray which appears in the dazzled eye should not be
represented.
Sec. 17. The practice of Turner. His keen perception of the more delicate
phenomena of rays.
Sec. 18. The total absence of any evidence of such perception in the works
of the old masters.
Now, as it has been proved that the appearance of beams can only take
place in a part of the sky which has clouds between it and the sun, it
is evident that no appearance of beams can ever begin from the orb
itself, except when there is a cloud or solid body of some kind between
us and it; but that such appearances will almost invariably begin on the
dark side of some of the clouds around it, the orb itself remaining the
centre of a broad blaze of united light. Wordsworth has given us in two
lines, the only circumstances under which rays can ever appear to have
origin in the orb itself:--
"But rays of light,
Now _suddenly_ diverging from the orb,
_Retired behind the mountain tops, or veiled
By the dense air_, shot upwards."
EXCURSION, Book IX.
And Turner has given us the effect magnificently in the Dartmouth of the
River Scenery. It is frequent among the old masters, and constant in
Claude; though the latter, from drawing his beams too fine, represents
the effect upon the dazzled eye rather than the light which actually
exists, and approximates very closely to the ideal which we see in the
sign of the Rising Sun; nay, I am nearly sure that I remember cases in
which he has given us the diverging beam, without any cloud or hill
interfering with the orb. It may, perhaps, be somewhat difficult to say
how far it is allowable to represent that kind of ray which is seen by
the dazzled eye. It is very certain that we never look towards a bright
sun without seeing glancing rays issue from it; but it is equally
certain that those rays are no more real existences than the red and
blue circles which we see after having been so dazzled, and that if we
are to represent the rays we ought also to cover our sky with pink and
blue circles. I should on the whole consider it utterly false in
principle to represent the visionary beam, and that we ought only to
show that which has actual existence. Such we find to be the constant
practice of Turner. Even where, owing to interposed clouds, he has beams
appearing to issue from the orb itself, they are broad bursts of light,
not spiky rays; and his more usual practice is to keep all near the sun
in one simple blaze of intense light, and from the first clouds to throw
beams to the zenith, though he often does not permit any appearance of
rays until close to the zenith itself. Open at the 80th page of the
Illustrated edition of Rogers's poems. You have there a sky blazing with
sunbeams; but they all begin a long way from the sun, and they are
accounted for by a mass of dense clouds surrounding the orb itself. Turn
to the 7th page. Behind the old oak, where the sun is supposed to be,
you have only a blaze of undistinguished light; but up on the left, over
the edge of the cloud, on its dark side, the sunbeam. Turn to page
192,--blazing rays again, but all beginning where the clouds do, not one
can you trace to the sun; and observe how carefully the long shadow on
the mountain is accounted for by the dim dark promontory projecting out
near the sun. I need not multiply examples; you will find various
modifications and uses of these effects throughout his works. But you
will not find a single trace of them in the old masters. They give you
the rays issuing from behind black clouds, and because they are a coarse
and common effect which could not possibly escape their observation, and
because they are easily imitated. They give you the spiky shafts
issuing from the orb itself, because these are partially symbolical of
light, and assist a tardy imagination, as two or three rays scratched
round the sun with a pen would, though they would be rays of darkness
instead of light.[30] But of the most beautiful phenomenon of all, the
appearance of the delicate ray far in the sky, threading its way among
the thin, transparent clouds, while all around the sun is unshadowed
fire, there is no record nor example whatsoever in their works. It was
too delicate and spiritual for them; probably their blunt and
feelingless eyes never perceived it in nature, and their untaught
imaginations were not likely to originate it in the study.
Sec. 19. Truth of the skies of modern drawings.
Little is to be said of the skies of our other landscape artists. In
paintings, they are commonly toneless, crude, and wanting in depth and
transparency; but in drawings, some very perfect and delicate examples
have been produced by various members of the old water color Society,
and one or two others; but with respect to the qualities of which we are
at present speaking, it is not right to compare drawings with paintings,
as the wash or spunging, or other artifices peculiar to water color, are
capable of producing an appearance of quality which it needs much higher
art to produce in oils.
Sec. 20. Recapitulation. The best skies of the ancients are, in quality,
inimitable, but in rendering of various truth, childish.
Taken generally, the open skies of the moderns are inferior in quality
to picked and untouched skies of the greatest of the ancients, but far
superior to the average class of pictures which we have every day
fathered upon their reputation. Nine or ten skies of Claude might be
named which are not to be contended with, in their way, and as many of
Cuyp. Teniers has given some very wonderful passages, and the clearness
of the early Italian and Dutch schools is beyond all imitation. But the
common blue daubing which we hear every day in our best galleries
attributed to Claude and Cuyp, and the genuine skies of Salvator, and of
both the Poussins, are not to be compared for an instant with the best
works of modern times, even in quality and transparency; while in all
matters requiring delicate observation or accurate science,--in all
which was not attainable by technicalities of art, and which depended
upon the artist's knowledge and understanding of nature, all the works
of the ancients are alike the productions of mere children, sometimes
manifesting great sensibility, but proving at the same time, feebly
developed intelligence and ill-regulated observation.
FOOTNOTES
[30] I have left this passage as it stood originally, because it is
right as far as it goes; yet it speaks with too little respect of
symbolism, which is often of the highest use in religious art, and
in some measure is allowable in all art. In the works of almost all
the greatest masters there are portions which are explanatory rather
than representative, and typical rather than imitative; nor could
these be parted with but at infinite loss. Note, with respect to the
present question, the daring black sunbeams of Titian, in his
woodcut of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, and compare here Part
III. Sect. II. Chap. IV. Sec. 18; Chap. V. Sec. 13. And though I believe
that I am right in considering all such symbolism as out of place in
pure landscape, and in attributing that of Claude to ignorance or
inability, and not to feeling, yet I praise Turner not so much for
his absolute refusal to represent the spiky ray about the sun, as
for his perceiving and rendering that which Claude never perceived,
the multitudinous presence of radiating light in the upper sky and
on all its countless ranks of subtile cloud.
CHAPTER II.
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS:--FIRST, OF THE REGION OF THE CIRRUS.
Sec. 1. Difficulty of ascertaining wherein the truth of clouds consists.
Our next subject of investigation must be the specific character of
clouds, a species of truth which is especially neglected by artists;
first, because as it is within the limits of possibility that a cloud
may assume almost any form, it is difficult to point out and not always
easy to feel, where in error consists; and secondly, because it is
totally impossible to study the forms of clouds from nature with care
and accuracy, as a change in the subject takes place between every touch
of the following pencil, and parts of an outline sketched at different
instants cannot harmonize, nature never having intended them to come
together. Still if artists were more in the habit of sketching clouds
rapidly, and as accurately as possible in the outline, from nature,
instead of daubing down what they call "effects" with the brush, they
would soon find there is more beauty about their forms than can be
arrived at by any random felicity of invention, however brilliant, and
more essential character than can be violated without incurring the
charge of falsehood,--falsehood as direct and definite, though not as
traceable as error in the less varied features of organic form.
Sec. 2. Variation of their character at different elevations. The three
regions to which they may conveniently be considered as
belonging.
The first and most important character of clouds, is dependent on the
different altitudes at which they are formed. The atmosphere may be
conveniently considered as divided into three spaces, each inhabited by
clouds of specific character altogether different, though, in reality
there is no distinct limit fixed between them by nature, clouds being
formed at _every_ altitude, and partaking according to their altitude,
more or less of the characters of the upper or lower regions. The
scenery of the sky is thus formed of an infinitely graduated series of
systematic forms of cloud, each of which has its own region in which
alone it is formed, and each of which has specific characters which can
only be properly determined by comparing them as they are found clearly
distinguished by intervals of considerable space. I shall therefore
consider the sky as divided into three regions--the upper region, or
region of the cirrus; the central region, or region of the stratus; the
lower region, or the region of the rain-cloud.
Sec. 3. Extent of the upper region.
Sec. 4. The symmetrical arrangement of its clouds.
The clouds which I wish to consider as included in the upper region,
never touch even the highest mountains of Europe, and may therefore be
looked upon as never formed below an of at least 15,000 feet; they are
the motionless multitudinous lines of delicate vapor with which the blue
of the open sky is commonly streaked or speckled after several days of
fine weather. I must be pardoned for giving a detailed description of
their specific characters as they are of constant occurrence in the
works of modern artists, and I shall have occasion to speak frequently
of them in future parts of the work. Their chief characters are--first,
Symmetry: They are nearly always arranged in some definite and evident
order, commonly in long ranks reaching sometimes from the zenith to the
horizon, each rank composed of an infinite number of transverse bars of
about the same length, each bar thickest in the middle, and terminating
in a traceless vaporous point at each side; the ranks are in the
direction of the wind, and the bars of course at right angles to it;
these latter are commonly slightly bent in the middle. Frequently two
systems of this kind, indicative of two currents of wind, at different
altitudes intersect one another, forming a network. Another frequent
arrangement is in groups of excessively fine, silky, parallel fibres,
commonly radiating, or having a tendency to radiate, from one of their
extremities, and terminating in a plumy sweep at the other:--these are
vulgarly known as "mares' tails." The plumy and expanded extremity of
these is often bent upwards, sometimes back and up again, giving an
appearance of great flexibility and unity at the same time, as if the
clouds were tough, and would hold together however bent. The narrow
extremity is invariably turned to the wind, and the fibres are parallel
with its direction. The upper clouds always fall into some modification
of one or other of these arrangements. They thus differ from all other
clouds, in having a plan and system; whereas other clouds, though there
are certain laws which they cannot break, have yet perfect freedom from
anything like a relative and general system of government. The upper
clouds are to the lower, what soldiers on parade are to a mixed
multitude; no men walk on their heads or their hands, and so there are
certain laws which no clouds violate; but there is nothing except in the
upper clouds resembling symmetrical discipline.
Sec. 5. Their exceeding delicacy.
Secondly, Sharpness of Edge: The edges of the bars of the upper clouds
which are turned to the wind, are often the sharpest which the sky
shows; no outline whatever of any other kind of cloud, however marked
and energetic, ever approaches the delicate decision of these edges. The
outline of a black thunder-cloud is striking, from the great energy of
the color or shade of the general mass; but as a line, it is soft and
indistinct, compared with the edge of the cirrus, in a clear sky with a
brisk breeze. On the other hand, the edge of the bar turned away from
the wind is always soft, often imperceptible, melting into the blue
interstice between it and its next neighbor. Commonly the sharper one
edge is, the softer is the other, and the clouds look flat, and as if
they slipped over each other like the scales of a fish. When both edges
are soft, as is always the case when the sky is clear and windless, the
cloud looks solid, round, and fleecy.
Sec. 6. Their number.
Thirdly, Multitude: The delicacy of these vapors is sometimes carried
into such an infinity of division, that no other sensation of number
that the earth or heaven can give is so impressive. Number is always
most felt when it is symmetrical, (vide Burke on "Sublime," Part ii.
sect. 8,) and, therefore, no sea-waves nor fresh leaves make their
number so evident or so impressive as these vapors. Nor is nature
content with an infinity of bars or lines alone--each bar is in its turn
severed into a number of small undulatory masses, more or less connected
according to the violence of the wind. When this division is merely
effected by undulation, the cloud exactly resembles sea-sand ribbed by
the tide; but when the division amounts to real separation we have the
mottled or mackerel skies. Commonly, the greater the division of its
bars, the broader and more shapeless is the rank or field, so that in
the mottled sky it is lost altogether, and we have large irregular
fields of equal size, masses like flocks of sheep; such clouds are three
or four thousand feet below the legitimate cirrus. I have seen them cast
a shadow on the Mont Blanc at sunset, so that they must descend nearly
to within fifteen thousand feet of the earth.
Sec. 7. Causes of their peculiarly delicate coloring.
Fourthly, Purity of Color: The nearest of these clouds--those over the
observer's head, being at least three miles above him, and nearly all
entering the ordinary sphere of vision, farther from him still,--their
dark sides are much grayer and cooler than those of other clouds, owing
to their distance. They are composed of the purest aqueous vapor, free
from all foulness of earthy gases, and of this in the lightest and most
ethereal state in which it can be, to be visible. Farther, they receive
the light of the sun in a state of far greater intensity than lower
objects, the beams being transmitted to them through atmospheric air far
less dense, and wholly unaffected by mist, smoke, or any other impurity.
Hence their colors are more pure and vivid, and their white less sullied
than those of any other clouds.
Sec. 8. Their variety of form.
Lastly, Variety: Variety is never so conspicuous, as when it is united
with symmetry. The perpetual change of form in other clouds, is
monotonous in its very dissimilarity, nor is difference striking where
no connection is implied; but if through a range of barred clouds,
crossing half the heaven, all governed by the same forces and falling
into one general form, there be yet a marked and evident dissimilarity
between each member of the great mass--one more finely drawn, the next
more delicately moulded, the next more gracefully bent--each broken into
differently modelled and variously numbered groups, the variety is
doubly striking, because contrasted with the perfect symmetry of which
it forms a part. Hence, the importance of the truth, that nature never
lets one of the members of even her most disciplined groups of cloud be
like another; but though each is adapted for the same function, and in
its great features resembles all the others, not one, out of the
millions with which the sky is checkered, is without a separate beauty
and character, appearing to have had distinct thought occupied in
its conception, and distinct forces in its production; and in addition
to this perpetual invention, visible in each member of each system, we
find systems of separate cloud intersecting one another, the sweeping
lines mingled and interwoven with the rigid bars, these in their turn
melting into banks of sand-like ripple and flakes of drifted and
irregular foam; under all, perhaps the massy outline of some lower cloud
moves heavily across the motionless buoyancy of the upper lines, and
indicates at once their elevation and their repose.
Sec. 9. Total absence of even the slightest effort at their representation,
in ancient landscape.
Such are the great attributes of the upper cloud region; whether they
are beautiful, valuable, or impressive, it is not our present business
to decide, nor to endeavor to discover the reason of the somewhat
remarkable fact, that the whole field of ancient landscape art affords,
as far as we remember, but one instance of any effort whatever to
represent the character of this cloud region. That one instance is the
landscape of Rubens in our own gallery, in which the mottled or fleecy
sky is given with perfect truth and exquisite beauty. To this should
perhaps be added, some of the backgrounds of the historical painters,
where horizontal lines were required, and a few level bars of white or
warm color cross the serenity of the blue. These, as far as they go, are
often very perfect, and the elevation and repose of their effect might,
we should have thought, have pointed out to the landscape painters that
there was something (I do not say much, but certainly something) to be
made out of the high clouds. Not one of them, however, took the hint. To
whom, among them all, can we look for the slightest realization of the
fine and faithful descriptive passage of the "Excursion," already
alluded to:--
"But rays of light,
Now suddenly diverging from the orb,
Retired behind the mountain tops, or veiled
By the dense air, shot upwards to the crown
Of the blue firmament--aloft--and wide:
And multitudes of little floating clouds,
Ere we, who saw, of change were conscious, pierced
Through their ethereal texture, had become
Vivid as fire,--Clouds separately poised,
Innumerable multitude of forms
Scattered through half the circle of the sky;
And giving back, and shedding each on each,
With prodigal communion, the bright hues
Which from the unapparent fount of glory
They had imbibed, and ceased not to receive.
That which the heavens displayed the liquid deep
Repeated, but with unity sublime."
Sec. 10. The intense and constant study of them by Turner.
There is but one master whose works we can think of while we read this;
one alone has taken notice of the neglected upper sky; it is his
peculiar and favorite field; he has watched its every modification, and
given its every phase and feature; at all hours, in all seasons, he has
followed its passions and its changes, and has brought down and laid
open to the world another apocalypse of heaven.
There is scarcely a painting of Turner's, in which serenity of sky and
intensity of light are aimed at together, in which these clouds are not
used, though there are not two cases in which they are used altogether
alike. Sometimes they are crowded together in masses of mingling light,
as in the Shylock; every part and atom sympathizing in that continuous
expression of slow movement which Shelley has so beautifully touched:--
"Underneath the young gray dawn
A multitude of dense, white fleecy clouds,
Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains,
_Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind_."
At other times they are blended with the sky itself, felt only here and
there by a ray of light calling them into existence out of its misty
shade, as in the Mercury and Argus; sometimes, where great repose is to
be given, they appear in a few detached, equal, rounded flakes, which
seem to hang motionless, each like the shadow of the other, in the deep
blue of the zenith, as in the Acro-Corinth; sometimes they are scattered
in fiery flying fragments, each burning with separate energy, as in the
Temeraire; sometimes woven together with fine threads of intermediate
darkness, melting into the blue as in the Napoleon. But in all cases the
exquisite manipulation of the master gives to each atom of the multitude
its own character and expression. Though they be countless as leaves,
each has its portion of light, its shadow, its reflex, its peculiar and
separating form.
Sec. 11. His vignette, Sunrise on the Sea.
Take for instance the illustrated edition of Rogers's Poems,[31] and
open it at the 80th page, and observe how every attribute which I have
pointed out in the upper sky, is there rendered with the faithfulness of
a mirror; the long lines of parallel bars, the delicate curvature from
the wind, which the inclination of the sail shows you to be from the
west; the excessive sharpness of every edge which is turned to the wind,
the faintness of every opposite one, the breaking up of each bar into
rounded masses, and finally, the inconceivable variety with which
individual form has been given to every member of the multitude, and not
only individual form, but roundness and substance even where there is
scarcely a hairbreadth of cloud to express it in. Observe, above
everything, the varying indication of space and depth in the whole, so
that you may look through and through from one cloud to another, feeling
not merely how they retire to the horizon, but how they melt back into
the recesses of the sky; every interval being filled with absolute air,
and all its spaces so melting and fluctuating, and fraught with change
as with repose, that as you look, you will fancy that the rays shoot
higher and higher into the vault of light, and that the pale streak of
horizontal vapor is melting away from the cloud that it crosses. Now
watch for the next barred sunrise, and take this vignette to the window,
and test it by nature's own clouds, among which you will find forms and
passages, I do not say merely _like_, but apparently the actual
originals of parts of this very drawing. And with whom will you do this,
except with Turner? Will you do it with Claude, and set that blank
square yard of blue, with its round, white, flat fixtures of similar
cloud, beside the purple infinity of nature, with her countless
multitude of shadowy lines, and flaky waves, and folded veils of
variable mist? Will you do it with Poussin, and set those massy steps of
unyielding solidity, with the chariot-and-four driving up them, by the
side of the delicate forms which terminate in threads too fine for the
eye to follow them, and of texture so thin woven that the earliest stars
shine through them? Will you do it with Salvator, and set that volume of
violent and restless manufactory smoke beside those calm and quiet bars,
which pause in the heaven as if they would never leave it more?
Sec. 12. His use of the cirrus in expressing mist.
Now we have just seen how Turner uses the sharp-edged cirri when he aims
at giving great transparency of air. But it was shown in the preceding
chapter that sunbeams, or the appearance of them, are always sharper in
their edge in proportion as the air is more misty, as they are most
defined in a room where there is most dust flying about in it.
Consequently, in the vignette we have been just noticing, where
transparency is to be given, though there is a blaze of light, its beams
are never edged; a tendency to rays is visible, but you cannot in any
part find a single marked edge of a rising sunbeam, the sky is merely
more flushed in one place than another. Now let us see what Turner does
when he wants mist. Turn to the Alps at Daybreak, page 193, in the same
book. Here we have the cirri used again, but now they have no sharp
edges, they are all fleecy and mingling with each other, though every
one of them has the most exquisite indication of individual form, and
they melt back, not till they are lost in exceeding light, as in the
other plate, but into a mysterious, fluctuating, shadowy sky, of which,
though the light penetrates through it all, you perceive every part to
be charged with vapor. Notice particularly the half-indicated forms even
where it is most serene, behind the snowy mountains. And now, how are
the sunbeams drawn? no longer indecisive, flushing, palpitating, every
one is sharp and clear, and terminated by definite shadow; note
especially the marked lines on the upper cloud; finally, observe the
difference in the mode of indicating the figures, which are here misty
and indistinguishable, telling only as shadows, though they are near and
large, while those in the former vignette came clear upon the eye,
though they were so far off as to appear mere points.
Sec. 13. His consistency in every minor feature.
Now is this perpetual consistency in all points, this concentration of
every fact which can possibly bear upon what we are to be told, this
watchfulness of the entire meaning and system of nature, which fills
every part and space of the picture with coincidences of witness, which
come out upon us, as they would from the reality, more fully and deeply
in proportion to the knowledge we possess and the attention we give,
admirable or not? I could go on writing page after page on every sky of
Turner's, and pointing out fresh truths in every one. In the Havre, for
instance, of the Rivers of France we have a new fact pointed out to us
with respect to these cirri, namely, their being so faint and
transparent as not to be distinguishable from the blue of the sky, (a
frequent case,) except in the course of a sunbeam, which, however, does
not illumine their edges, they being not solid enough to reflect light,
but penetrates their whole substance, and renders them flat, luminous
forms in its path, instantly and totally lost at its edge. And thus a
separate essay would be required by every picture, to make fully
understood the new phenomena which it treated and illustrated. But after
once showing what are the prevailing characteristics of these clouds, we
can only leave it to the reader to trace them wherever they occur. There
are some fine and characteristic passages of this kind of cloud given by
Stanfield, though he dares not use them in multitude, and is wanting in
those refined qualities of form which it is totally impossible to
explain in words, but which, perhaps, by simple outlines, on a large
scale, selected from the cloud forms of various artists, I may in
following portions of the work illustrate with the pencil.
Sec. 14. The color of the upper clouds.
Of the colors of these clouds I have spoken before, (Sec. I. Chap. II.;)
but though I then alluded to their purity and vividness, I scarcely took
proper notice of their variety; there is indeed in nature variety in all
things, and it would be absurd to insist on it in each case, yet the
colors of these clouds are so marvellous in their changefulness, that
they require particular notice. If you watch for the next sunset, when
there are a considerable number of these cirri in the sky, you will see,
especially at the zenith, that the sky does not remain of the same color
for two inches together; one cloud has a dark side of cold blue, and a
fringe of milky white; another, above it, has a dark side of purple and
an edge of red; another, nearer the sun, has an under-side of orange
and an edge of gold; these you will find mingled with, and passing into
the blue of the sky, which in places you will not be able to distinguish
from the cool gray of the darker clouds, and which will be itself full
of gradation, now pure and deep, now faint and feeble; and all this is
done, not in large pieces, nor on a large scale, but over and over again
in every square yard, so that there is no single part nor portion of the
whole sky which has not in itself variety of color enough for a separate
picture, and yet no single part which is like another, or which has not
some peculiar source of beauty, and some peculiar arrangement of color
of its own. Now, instead of this, you get in the old masters--Cuyp, or
Claude, or whoever they may be--a field of blue, delicately,
beautifully, and uniformly shaded down to the yellow sun, with a certain
number of similar clouds, each with a dark side of the same gray, and an
edge of the same yellow. I do not say that nature never does anything
like this, but I say that her _principle_ is to do a great deal more,
and that what she does more than this,--what I have above described, and
what you may see in nine sunsets out of ten,--has been observed,
attempted, and rendered by Turner only, and by him with a fidelity and
force which presents us with more essential truth, and more clear
expression and illustration of natural laws, in every wreath of vapor,
than composed the whole stock of heavenly information, which lasted Cuyp
and Claude their lives.
Sec. 15. Recapitulation.
We close then our present consideration of the upper clouds, to return
to them when we know what is beautiful; we have at present only to
remember that of these clouds, and the truths connected with them, none
before Turner had taken any notice whatsoever; that had they therefore
been even feebly and imperfectly represented by him, they would yet have
given him a claim to be considered more extended and universal in his
statement of truths than any of his predecessors; how much more when we
find that deep fidelity in his studied and perfect skies which opens new
sources of delight to every advancement of our knowledge, and to every
added moment of our contemplation.
FOOTNOTES
[31] I use this work frequently for illustration, because it is the
only one I know in which the engraver has worked with delicacy
enough to give the real forms and touches of Turner. I can reason
from these plates, (in questions of form only,) nearly as well as I
could from the drawings.
CHAPTER III.
OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS:--SECONDLY, OF THE CENTRAL CLOUD REGION.
Sec. 1. Extent and typical character of the central cloud region.
We have next to investigate the character of the Central Cloud Region,
which I consider as including all clouds which are the usual
characteristic of ordinary serene weather, and which touch and envelop
the mountains of Switzerland, but never affect those of our own island;
they may therefore be considered as occupying a space of air ten
thousand feet in height, extending from five to fifteen thousand feet
above the sea.
Sec. 2. Its characteristic clouds, requiring no attention nor thought for
their representation, are therefore favorite subjects with the
old masters.
These clouds, according to their elevation, appear with great variety of
form, often partaking of the streaked or mottled character of the higher
region, and as often, when the precursors of storm, manifesting forms
closely connected with the lowest rain clouds; but the species
especially characteristic of the central region is a white, ragged,
irregular, and scattered vapor, which has little form and less color,
and of which a good example may be seen in the largest landscape of
Cuyp, in the Dulwich Gallery. When this vapor collects into masses, it
is partially rounded, clumsy, and ponderous, as if it would tumble out
of the sky, shaded with a dull gray, and totally devoid of any
appearance of energy or motion. Even in nature, these clouds are
comparatively uninteresting, scarcely worth raising our heads to look
at; and on canvas, valuable only as a means of introducing light, and
breaking the monotony of blue; yet they are, perhaps, beyond all others
the favorite clouds of the Dutch masters. Whether they had any motive
for the adoption of such materials, beyond the extreme facility with
which acres of canvas might thus be covered without any troublesome
exertion of thought; or any temptation to such selections beyond the
impossibility of error where nature shows no form, and the
impossibility of deficiency where she shows no beauty, it is not here
the place to determine. Such skies are happily beyond the reach of
criticism, for he who tells you nothing cannot tell you a falsehood. A
little flake-white, glazed with a light brush over the carefully toned
blue, permitted to fall into whatever forms chance might determine, with
the single precaution that their edges should be tolerably irregular,
supplied, in hundreds of instances, a sky quite good enough for all
ordinary purposes--quite good enough for cattle to graze, or boors to
play at nine-pins under--and equally devoid of all that could gratify,
inform, or offend.
Sec. 3. The clouds of Salvator and Poussin.
But although this kind of cloud is, as I have said, typical of the
central region, it is not one which nature is fond of. She scarcely ever
lets an hour pass without some manifestation of finer forms, sometimes
approaching the upper cirri, sometimes the lower cumulus. And then in
the lower outlines, we have the nearest approximation which nature ever
presents to the clouds of Claude, Salvator, and Poussin, to the
characters of which I must request especial attention, as it is here
only that we shall have a fair opportunity of comparing their skies with
those of the modern school. I shall, as before, glance rapidly at the
great laws of specific form, and so put it in the power of the reader to
judge for himself of the truth of representation.
Sec. 4. Their essential characters.
Sec. 5. Their angular forms and general decision of outline.
Clouds, it is to be remembered, are not so much local vapor, as vapor
rendered locally visible by a fall of temperature. Thus a cloud, whose
parts are in constant motion, will hover on a snowy mountain, pursuing
constantly the same track upon its flanks, and yet remaining of the same
size, the same form, and in the same place, for half a day together. No
matter how violent or how capricious the wind may be, the instant it
approaches the spot where the chilly influence of the snow extends, the
moisture it carries becomes visible, and then and there the cloud forms
on the instant, apparently maintaining its form against the wind, though
the careful and keen eye can see all its parts in the most rapid motion
across the mountain. The outlines of such a cloud are of course not
determined by the irregular impulses of the wind, but by the fixed lines
of radiant heat which regulate the temperature of the atmosphere of the
mountain. It is terminated, therefore, not by changing curves, but by
steady right lines of more or less decision, often exactly correspondent
with the outline of the mountain on which it is formed, and falling
therefore into grotesque peaks and precipices. I have seen the marked
and angular outline of the Grandes Jorasses, at Chamounix, mimicked in
its every jag by a line of clouds above it. Another resultant phenomenon
is the formation of cloud in the calm air to leeward of a steep summit;
cloud whose edges are in rapid motion, where they are affected by the
current of the wind above, and stream from the peak like the smoke of a
volcano, yet always vanish at a certain distance from it as steam
issuing from a chimney. When wet weather of some duration is
approaching, a small white spot of cloud will sometimes appear low on
the hill flanks; it will not move, but will increase gradually for some
little time, then diminish, still without moving; disappear altogether,
reappear ten minutes afterwards, exactly in the same spot; increase to a
greater extent than before, again disappear, again return, and at last
permanently; other similar spots of cloud forming simultaneously, with
various fluctuations, each in its own spot, and at the same level on the
hill-side, until all expand, join together, and form an unbroken veil of
threatening gray, which darkens gradually into storm. What in such cases
takes place palpably and remarkably, is more or less a law of formation
in all clouds whatsoever; they being bounded rather by lines expressive
of changes of temperature in the atmosphere, than by the impulses of the
currents of wind in which those changes take place. Even when in rapid
and visible motion across the sky, the variations which take place in
their outlines are not so much alterations of position and arrangement
of parts, as they are the alternate formation and disappearance of
parts. There is, therefore, usually a parallelism and consistency in
their great outlines, which give system to the smaller curves of which
they are composed; and if these great lines be taken, rejecting the
minutiae of variation, the resultant form will almost always be angular,
and full of character and decision. In the flock-like fields of equal
masses, each individual mass has the effect, not of an ellipse or
circle, but of a rhomboid; the sky is crossed and checkered, not
honeycombed; in the lower cumuli, even though the most rounded of all
clouds, the groups are not like balloons or bubbles, but like towers or
mountains. And the result of this arrangement in masses more or less
angular, varied with, and chiefly constructed of, curves of the utmost
freedom and beauty, is that appearance of exhaustless and fantastic
energy which gives every cloud a marked character of its own, suggesting
resemblances to the specific outlines of organic objects. I do not say
that such accidental resemblances are a character to be imitated; but
merely that they bear witness to the originality and vigor of separate
conception in cloud forms, which give to the scenery of the sky a force
and variety no less delightful than that of the changes of mountain
outline in a hill district of great elevation; and that there is added
to this a spirit-like feeling, a capricious, mocking imagery of passion
and life, totally different from any effects of inanimate form that the
earth can show.
Sec. 6. The composition of their minor curves.
The minor contours, out of which the larger outlines are composed, are
indeed beautifully curvilinear; but they are never monotonous in their
curves. First comes a concave line, then a convex one, then an angular
jag, breaking off into spray, then a downright straight line, then a
curve again, then a deep gap, and a place where all is lost and melted
away, and so on; displaying in every inch of the form renewed and
ceaseless invention, setting off grace with rigidity, and relieving
flexibility with force, in a manner scarcely less admirable, and far
more changeful than even in the muscular forms of the human frame. Nay,
such is the exquisite composition of all this, that you may take any
single fragment of any cloud in the sky, and you will find it put
together as if there had been a year's thought over the plan of it,
arranged with the most studied inequality--with the most delicate
symmetry--with the most elaborate contrast, a picture in itself. You may
try every other piece of cloud in the heaven, and you will find them
every one as perfect, and yet not one in the least like another.
Sec. 7. Their characters, as given by S. Rosa.
Now it may perhaps, for anything we know, or have yet proved, be highly
expedient and proper, in art, that this variety, individuality, and
angular character should be changed into a mass of convex curves, each
precisely like its neighbor in all respects, and unbroken from beginning
to end;--it may be highly original, masterly, bold, whatever you choose
to call it; but it is _false_. I do not take upon me to assert that the
clouds which in ancient Germany were more especially and peculiarly
devoted to the business of catching princesses off desert islands, and
carrying them to enchanted castles, might not have possessed something
of the pillowy organization which we may suppose best adapted for
functions of such delicacy and dispatch. But I do mean to say that the
clouds which God sends upon his earth as the ministers of dew, and rain,
and shade, and with which he adorns his heaven, setting them in its
vault for the thrones of his spirits, have not in one instant or atom of
their existence, one feature in common with such conceptions and
creations. And there are, beyond dispute, more direct and unmitigated
falsehoods told, and more laws of nature set at open defiance in _one_
of the "rolling" skies of Salvator, such as that marked 159 in the
Dulwich Gallery, than were ever attributed, even by the ignorant and
unfeeling, to all the wildest flights of Turner put together.
Sec. 8. Monotony and falsehood of the clouds of the Italian School
generally.
And it is not as if the error were only occasional. It is systematic and
constant in all the Italian masters of the seventeenth century, and in
most of the Dutch. They looked at clouds as at everything else which did
not particularly help them in their great end of deception, with utter
carelessness and bluntness of feeling,--saw that there were a great many
rounded passages in them,--found it much easier to sweep circles than to
design beauties, and sat down in their studies, contented with perpetual
repetitions of the same spherical conceptions, having about the same
relation to the clouds of nature, that a child's carving of a turnip has
to the head of the Apollo. Look at the round things about the sun in the
bricky Claude, the smallest of the three Seaports in the National
Gallery. They are a great deal more like half-crowns than clouds. Take
the ropy, tough-looking wreath in the Sacrifice of Isaac, and find one
part of it, if you can, which is not the repetition of every other part
of it, all together being as round and vapid as the brush could draw
them; or take the two cauliflower-like protuberances in No. 220 of the
Dulwich Gallery, and admire the studied similarity between them; you
cannot tell which is which; or take the so-called Nicholas Poussin, No.
212, Dulwich Gallery, in which, from the brown trees to the right-hand
side of the picture, there is not one line which is not physically
impossible.
Sec. 9. Vast size of congregated masses of cloud.
Sec. 10. Demonstrable by comparison with mountain ranges.
But it is not the outline only which is thus systematically false. The
drawing of the solid form is worse still, for it is to be remembered
that although clouds of course arrange themselves more or less into
broad masses, with a light side and dark side, both their light and
shade are invariably composed of a series of divided masses, each of
which has in its outline as much variety and character as the great
outline of the cloud; presenting, therefore, a thousand times repeated,
all that I have described as characteristic of the general form. Nor are
these multitudinous divisions a truth of slight importance in the
character of sky, for they are dependent on, and illustrative of, a
quality which is usually in a great degree overlooked,--the enormous
retiring spaces of solid clouds. Between the illumined edge of a heaped
cloud, and that part of its body which turns into shadow, there will
generally be a clear distance of several miles, more or less of course,
according to the general size of the cloud, but in such large masses as
in Poussin and others of the old masters, occupy the fourth or fifth of
the visible sky; the clear illumined breadth of vapor, from the edge to
the shadow, involves at least a distance of five or six miles. We are
little apt, in watching the changes of a mountainous range of cloud, to
reflect that the masses of vapor which compose it, are huger and higher
than any mountain range of the earth; and the distances between mass and
mass are not yards of air traversed in an instant by the flying form,
but valleys of changing atmosphere leagues over; that the slow motion of
ascending curves, which we can scarcely trace, is a boiling energy of
exulting vapor rushing into the heaven a thousand feet in a minute; and
that the toppling angle whose sharp edge almost escapes notice in the
multitudinous forms around it, is a nodding precipice of storms, 3000
feet from base to summit. It is not until we have actually compared the
forms of the sky with the hill ranges of the earth, and seen the soaring
Alp overtopped and buried in one surge of the sky, that we begin to
conceive or appreciate the colossal scale of the phenomena of the
latter. But of this there can be no doubt in the mind of any one
accustomed to trace the forms of clouds among hill ranges--as it is
there a demonstrable and evident fact, that the space of vapor visibly
extended over an ordinarily cloudy sky, is not less, from the point
nearest to the observer to the horizon, than twenty leagues; that the
size of every mass of separate form, if it be at all largely divided, is
to be expressed in terms of _miles_; and that every boiling heap of
illuminated mist in the nearer sky, is an enormous mountain, fifteen or
twenty thousand feet in height, six or seven miles over an illuminated
surface, furrowed by a thousand colossal ravines, torn by local tempests
into peaks and promontories, and changing its features with the majestic
velocity of the volcano.
Sec. 11. And consequent divisions and varieties of feature.
To those who have once convinced themselves of these proportions of the
heaven, it will be immediately evident, that though we might, without
much violation of truth, omit the minor divisions of a cloud four yards
over, it is the veriest audacity of falsehood to omit those of masses
where for yards we have to read miles; first, because it is physically
impossible that such a space should be without many and vast divisions;
secondly, because divisions at such distances must be sharply and
forcibly marked by aerial perspective, so that not only they must be
there, but they must be visible and evident to the eye; and thirdly,
because these multitudinous divisions are absolutely necessary, in order
to express this space and distance, which cannot but be fully and
imperfectly felt, even with every aid and evidence that art can give of
it.
Sec. 12. Not lightly to be omitted.
Now if an artist taking for his subject a chain of vast mountains,
several leagues long, were to unite all their varieties of ravine, crag,
chasm, and precipice, into one solid, unbroken mass, with one light side
and one dark side, looking like a white ball or parallelopiped two yards
broad, the words "breadth," "boldness," or, "generalization," would
scarcely be received as a sufficient apology for a proceeding so
glaringly false, and so painfully degrading. But when, instead of the
really large and simple forms of mountains, united, as they commonly
are, by some great principle of common organization, and so closely
resembling each other as often to correspond in line, and join in
effect; when instead of this, we have to do with spaces of cloud twice
as vast, broken up into a multiplicity of forms necessary to, and
characteristic of, their very nature--those forms subject to a thousand
local changes, having no association with each other, and rendered
visible in a thousand places by their own transparency or cavities,
where the mountain forms would be lost in shade,--that this far greater
space, and this far more complicated arrangement, should be all summed
up into one round mass, with one swell of white, and one flat side of
unbroken gray, is considered an evidence of the sublimest powers in the
artist of generalization and breadth. Now it may be broad, it may be
grand, it may be beautiful, artistical, and in every way desirable. I
don't say it is not--I merely say it is a concentration of every kind of
falsehood: it is depriving heaven of its space, clouds of their
buoyancy, winds of their motion, and distance of its blue.
Sec. 13. Imperfect conceptions of this size and extent in ancient
landscape.