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Inese drawings have unfortunately changed hands frequently, and have been abused and ill treated by picture dealers and cleaners; the greater number of them, are now mere wrecks. I name them not as instances, but as proofs of the artist's study in this district; for the affection to which they owe their excellence, must have been grounded long years before. It is to be traced, not only in these drawings of the places themselves, but in the peculiar love of the painter for rounded forms of hills; not but that he is right in this on general principles, for I doubt not, that, with his peculiar feeling for beauty of line, his hills would have been rounded still, even if he had studied first among the peaks of Cadore; but rounded to the same extent and with the same delight in their roundness, they would not have been. It is, I believe, to those broad wooded steeps and swells of the Yorkshire downs that we in part owe the singular massiveness that prevails in Turner's mountain drawing, and gives it one of its chief elements of grandeur. Let the reader open the Liber Studiorum, and compare the painter's enjoyment of the lines in the Ben Arthur, with his comparative uncomfortableness among those of the aiguilles about the Mer de Glace. Great as he is, those peaks would have been touched very differently by a Savoyard as great as he.

I am in the habit of looking to the Yorkshire drawings, as indicating one of the culminating points in Turner's career. In these he attained the highest degree of what he had up to that time attempted, namely, finish and quantity of form united with expression of atmosphere, and light without color. His early drawings are singularly instructive in this definiteness and simplicity of aim. No complicated or brilliant color is ever thought of in them; they are little more than exquisite studies in light and shade, very green blues being used for the shadows, and golden browns for the lights. The difficulty and treachery of color being thus avoided, the artist was able to bend his whole mind upon the drawing, and thus to attain such decision, delicacy, and completeness as have never in any wise been equalled, and as might serve him for a secure foundation in all after experiments. Of the quantity and precision of his details, the drawings made for Hakewill's Italy, are singular examples. The most perfect gem in execution is a little bit on the Rhine, with

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eds in the oreground, in the possession of B. G. Windus, sq., of Tottenham; but the Yorkshire drawings seem to be on e whole the most noble representatives of his art at this period. About the time of their production, the artist seems to have it that he had done either all that could be done, or all that Es necessary, in that manner, and began to reach after someing beyond it. The element of color begins to mingle with s work, and in the first efforts to reconcile his intense feeling it with his careful form, several anomalies begin to be visible, d some unfortunate or uninteresting works necessarily belong the period. The England drawings, which are very characistic of it, are exceedingly unequal,—some, as the Oakhamp1, Kilgarren, Alnwick, and Llanthony, being among his finest rks; others, as the Windsor from Eton, the Eton College, d the Bedford, showing coarseness and conventionality.

The domestic

I do not know at what time the painter first went abroad, t among the earliest of the series of the Liber Studiorum ates 1808, 1809,) occur the magnificent Mont St. Gothard, and little Devil's Bridge. Now it is remarkable that jects of the after his acquaintance with this scenery, so coner Studiorum. genial in almost all respects with the energy of his nd, and supplying him with materials of which in these two ojects, and in the Chartreuse, and several others afterwards, showed both his entire appreciation and command, the prortion of English to foreign subjects should in the rest of the rk be more than two to one; and that those English subts should be-many of them-of a kind peculiarly simple, and every-day occurrence, such as the Pembury Mill, the Farm rd Composition with the White Horse, that with the Cocks dPigs, Hedging and Ditching, Watercress Gatherers (scene Twickenham,) and the beautiful and solemn rustic subject led a Watermill; and that the architectural subjects instead being taken, as might have been expected of an artist so fond treating effects of extended space, from some of the enormous tinental masses are almost exclusively British; Rivaulx, ly Island, Dumblain, Dunstanborough, Chepstow, St. Cathne's, Greenwich Hospital, an English Parish Church, a xon Ruin, and an exquisite Reminiscence of the English wland Castle in the pastoral, with the brook, wooden bridge,

and wild duck, to all of which we have nothing foreign to oppose but three slight, ill-considered, and unsatisfactory subjects, from Basle, Lauffenbourg, and another Swiss village; and, further, not only is the preponderance of subject British, but of affection also; for it is strange with what fulness and completion the home subjects are treated in comparison with the greater part of the foreign ones. Compare the figures and sheep in the Hedging and Ditching, and the East Gate Winchelsea, together with the near leafage, with the puzzled foreground and inappropriate figures of the Lake of Thun; or the cattle and road of the St. Catherine's Hill, with the foreground of the Bonneville; or the exquisite figure with the sheaf of corn, in the Watermill, with the vintages of the Grenoble subject.

In his foliage the same predilections are remarkable. Reminiscences of English willows by the brooks, and English forest glades mingle even with the heroic foliage of the Esacus and Hesperie, and the Cephalus ; into the pine, whether of Switzerland or the glorious Stone, he cannot enter, or enters at his peril, like Ariel. Those of the Valley of Chamounix are fine masses, better pines than other people's, but not a bit like pines for all that; he feels his weakness, and tears them off the distant mountains with the mercilessness of an avalanche. The Stone pines of the two Italian compositions are fine in their arrangement, but they are very pitiful pines; the glory of the Alpine rose he never touches; he munches chestnuts with no relish ; never has learned to like olives; and, by the vine, we find him in the foreground of the Grenoble Alps laid utterly and incontrɔvertibly on his back.

I adduce these evidences of Turner's nationality (and innumerable others might be given if need were) not as proofs of weakness but of power; not so much as testifying want of perception in foreign lands, as strong hold on his own will; for I am sure that no artist who has not this hold upon his own will ever get good out of any other. Keeping this principle in mind, it is instructive to observe the depth and solemnity which Turner's feeling received from the scenery of the continent, the keen appreciation up to a certain point of all that is locally characteristic, and the ready seizure for future use of all valuable material.

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41. Turner's

ainting of
rench and Swiss

tter deficient.

Of all foreign countries he has most entirely entered into the pirit of France; partly because here he found more fellowship f scene with his own England, partly because an amount of thought which will miss of Italy or Switzerland, will fathom France; partly because there is in the ndscape. The French foliage and forms of ground, much that is especially congenial with his own peculiar choice f form. To what cause it is owing I cannot tell, nor is it genrally allowed or felt; but of the fact I am certain, that for race of stem and perfection of form in their transparent foliage, he French trees are altogether unmatched; and their modes of rouping and massing are so perfectly and constantly beautiful at I think of all countries for educating an artist to the pereption of grace, France bears the bell; and that not romantic or mountainous France, not the Vosges, nor Auvergne, nor Provence, but lowland France, Picardy and Normandy, the val eys of the Loire and Seine, and even the district, so thoughtessly and mindlessly abused by English travellers, as uninterestng, traversed between Calais and Dijon; of which there is not single valley but is full of the most lovely pictures, nor a mile om which the artist may not receive instruction; the district nmediately about Sens being perhaps the most valuable from he grandeur of its lines of poplars and the unimaginable finish nd beauty of the tree forms in the two great avenues without he walls. Of this kind of beauty Turner was the first to take ognizance, and he still remains the only, but in himself the ufficient painter of French landscape. One of the most beautial examples is the drawing of trees engraved for the Keepsake, ow in the possession of B. G. Windus, Esq.; the drawings ade to illustrate the scenery of the Rivers of France supply stances of the most varied character.

The artist appears, until very lately, rather to have taken com Switzerland thoughts and general conceptions of size and grand form and effect to be used in his after compositions, man to have attempted the seizing of its actual character. This as beforehand to be expected from the utter physical impossility of rendering certain effects of Swiss scenery, and the onotony and unmanageableness of others. The Valley of hamounix in the collection of Walter Fawkes, Esq., I have

never seen; it has a high reputation; the Hannibal passing the Alps in its present state exhibits nothing but a heavy shower and a crowd of people getting wet; another picture in the artist's gallery of a land-fall is most masterly and interesting, but more daring than agreeable. The Snow-storm, avalanche, and inundation, is one of his mightiest works, but the amount of mountain drawing in it is less than of cloud and effect; the subjects in the Liber Studiorum are on the whole the most intensely felt, and next to them the vignettes to Rogers's Poems and Italy. Of some recent drawings of Swiss subject I shall speak presently.

ing of Italian

The effect of Italy upon his mind is very puzzling. On the one hand, it gave him the solemnity and power which are manifested in the historical compositions of the Liber Studiorum, $42. His render- more especially the Rizpah, the Cephalus, the scene character still less from the Fairy Queen, and the Esacus and Hesperie on the other, he seems never to have entered tions how failing. thoroughly into the spirit of Italy, and the materials he obtained there were afterwards but awkwardly introduced in his large compositions.

successful. His

large composi

stone.

Of these there are very few at all worthy of him; none but the Liber Studiorum subjects are thoroughly great, and these are great because there is in them the seriousness without the materials of other countries and times. There is nothing particularly indicative of Palestine in the Barley Harvest of the Rizpah, nor in those round and awful trees; only the solemnity of the south in the lifting of the near burning moon. The rocks of the Jason may be seen in any quarry of Warwickshire sandJason himself has not a bit of Greek about him—he is a simple warrior of no period in particular, nay, I think there is something of the nineteenth century about his legs. When local character of this classical kind is attempted, the painter is visibly cramped: awkward resemblances to Claude testify the want of his usual forceful originality in the tenth Plague of Egypt, he makes us think of Belzoni rather than of Moses; the fifth is a total failure, the pyramids look like brick-kilns, and the fire running along the ground bears brotherly resemblance to the burning of manure. The realization of the tenth plague now in his gallery is finer than the study, but still uninteresting; and of the large compositions which have much of Italy in them,

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