he greater part are overwhelmed with quantity and deficient in motion. The Crossing the Brook is one of the best of these ybrid pictures; incomparable in its tree drawing, it yet leaves s doubtful where we are to look and what we are to feel; it is orthern in its color, southern in its foliage, Italy in its details, nd England in its sensations, without the grandeur of the one, r the healthiness of the other.

The two Carthages are mere rationalizations of Claude, one f them excessively bad in color, the other a grand thought, and et one of the kind which does no one any good, because everying in it is reciprocally sacrificed; the foliage is sacrificed to e architecture, the architecture to the water, the water is either sea, nor river, nor lake, nor brook, nor canal, and savors f Regent's Park; the foreground is uncomfortable ground,-let n building leases. So the Caligula's Bridge, Temple of upiter, Departure of Regulus, Ancient Italy, Cicero's Villa, nd such others, come they from whose hand they may, I class nder the general head of "nonsense pictures.' There never an be any wholesome feeling developed in these preposterous ccumulations, and where the artist's feeling fails, his art folws; so that the worst possible examples of Turner's color are ound in pictures of this class; in one or two instances he has roken through the conventional rules, and then is always fine, in the Hero and Leander; but in general the picture rises in alue as it approaches to a view, as the Fountain of Fallacy, a iece of rich northern Italy, with some fairy waterworks; this icture was unrivalled in color once, but is now a mere wreck. o the Rape of Proserpine, though it is singular that in his cademy pictures even his simplicity fails of reaching ideality; this picture of Proserpine the nature is not the grand nature f all time, it is indubitably modern,* and we are perfectly lectrified at anybody's being carried away in the corner except

* This passage seems at variance with what has been said of the necesty of painting present times and objects. It is not so. A great painter akes out of that which he finds before him something which is indepenent of all time. He can only do this out of the materials ready to his and, but that which he builds has the dignity of dateless age. A little ainter is annihilated by an anachronism, and is conventionally antique, nd involuntarily modern.

by people with spiky hats and carabines. This is traceable to several causes; partly to the want of any grand specific form, partly to the too evident middle-age character of the ruins crowning the hills, and to a multiplicity of minor causes which we cannot at present enter into.

§ 43. His views of

by brilliancy and

tity.

Neither in his actual views of Italy has Turner ever caught her true spirit, except in the little vignettes to Rogers's Poems. The Villa of Galileo, the nameless composition with stone pines, the several villa moonlights, and the convent comItaly destroyed positions in the Voyage of Columbus, are altogether redundant quan- exquisite; but this is owing chiefly to their simplicity and perhaps in some measure to their smallness of size. None of his large pictures at all equal them; the Bay of Baiae is encumbered with material, it contains ten times as much as is necessary to a good picture, and yet is so crude in color as to look unfinished. The Palestrina is full of raw white, and has a look of Hampton Court about its long avenue; the modern Italy is purely English in its near foliage; it is composed from Tivoli material enriched and arranged most dexterously, but it has the look of a rich arrangement, and not the virtue of the real thing. The early Tivoli, a large drawing taken from below the falls, was as little true, and still less fortunate, the trees there being altogether affected and artificial. The Florence engraved in the Keepsake is a glorious drawing, as far as regards the passage with the bridge and sunlight on the Arno, the Cascine foliage, and distant plain, and the towers of the fortress on the left; but the details of the duomo and the city are entirely missed, and with them the majesty of the whole scene. The vines and melons of the foreground are disorderly, and its cypresses conventional; in fact, I recollect no instance of Turner's drawing a cypress except in general terms.

The chief reason of these failures I imagine to be the effort of the artist to put joyousness and brilliancy of effect upon scenes eminently pensive, to substitute radiance for serenity of light, and to force the freedom and breadth of line which he learned to love on English downs and Highland moors, out of a country dotted by campaniles and square convents, bristled with cypresses, partitioned by walls, and gone up and down by steps.

In one of the cities of Italy he had no such difficulties to

counter. At Venice he found freedom of space, brilliancy of ht, variety of color, massy simplicity of general form; and to nice we owe many of the motives in which his highest powers color have been displayed after that change in his system of ich we must now take note.

uced by him

Among the earlier paintings of Turner, the culminating iod, marked by the Yorkshire series in his drawings, is disguished by great solemnity and simplicity of subject, prevaChanges in- lent gloom in light and shade, and brown in the the received hue, the drawing manly but careful, the minutia m of art. sometimes exquisitely delicate. All the finest works this period are, I believe, without exception, views, or quiet gle thoughts. The Calder Bridge, belonging to E. Bicknell, 1., is a most pure and beautiful example. The Ivy Bridge magine to be later, but its rock foreground is altogether rivalled and remarkable for its delicacy of detail; a butterfly een settled on one of the large brown stones in the midst of torrent. Two paintings of Bonneville, in Savoy, one in possession of Abel Allnutt, Esq., the other, and, I think, finest, in a collection at Birmingham, show more variety of or than is usual with him at the period, and are in every pect magnificent examples. Pictures of this class are of uliar value, for the larger compositions of the same period all poor in color, and most of them much damaged, but the aller works have been far finer originally, and their color ms secure. There is nothing in the range of landscape art al to them in their way, but the full character and capacity he painter is not in them. Grand as they are in their sobriety, y still leave much to be desired; there is great heaviness in ir shadows, the material is never thoroughly vanquished, ough this partly for a very noble reason, that the painter is ays thinking of and referring to nature, and indulges in no stical conventionalities,) and sometimes the handling appears ole. In warmth, lightness, and transparency they have no nce against Gainsborough; in clear skies and air tone they alike unfortunate when they provoke comparison with ude; and in force and solemnity they can in no wise stand. h the landscape of the Venetians.

The painter evidently felt that he had farther powers, and

pressed forward into the field where alone they could be brought into play. It was impossible for him, with all his keen and longdisciplined perceptions, not to feel that the real color of nature had never been attempted by any school; and that though conventional representations had been given by the Venetians of sunlight and twilight, by invariably rendering the whites golden and the blues green, yet of the actual, joyous, pure, roseate hues of the external world no record had ever been given. He saw also that the finish and specific grandeur of nature had been given, but her fulness, space, and mystery never; and he saw that the great landscape painters had always sunk the lower middle tints of nature in extreme shade, bringing the entire melody of color as many degrees down as their possible light was inferior to nature's; and that in so doing a gloomy principle had influenced them even in their choice of subject.

For the conventional color he substituted a pure straightforward rendering of fact, as far as was in his power; and that not of such fact as had been before even suggested, but of all that is most brilliant, beautiful, and inimitable; he went to the cataract for its iris, to the conflagration for its flames, asked of the sea its intensest azure, of the sky its clearest gold. For the limited space and defined forms of elder landscape, he substituted the quantity and the mystery of the vastest scenes of earth; and for the subdued chiaroscuro he substituted first a balanced diminution of oppositions throughout the scale, and afterwards, in one or two instances, attempted the reverse of the old principle, taking the lowest portion of the scale truly, and merging the upper part in high light.

Resultant deficien

cies.

Innovations so daring and so various could not be introduced without corresponding peril: the difficulties that lay in his way were more than any human intellect could altogether surmount. In his time there has been no one system of color $45. Difficulties of his later manner. generally approved; every artist has his own method and his own vehicle; how to do what Gainsborough did, we know not; much less what Titian; to invent a new system of color can hardly be expected of those who cannot recover the old. To obtain perfectly satisfactory results in color under the new conditions introduced by Turner, would at least have required the exertion of all his energies in that sole

ection. But color has always been only his second object. e effects of space and form, in which he delights, often require › employment of means and method totally at variance with se necessary for the obtaining of pure color. It is physically possible, for instance, rightly to draw certain forms of the per clouds with the brush; nothing will do it but the pallet ife with loaded white after the blue ground is prepared. Now 3 impossible that a cloud so drawn, however glazed afterwards, uld have the virtue of a thin warm tint of Titian's, showing canvas throughout. So it happens continually. Add to se difficulties, those of the peculiar subjects attempted, and hese again, all that belong to the altered system of chiaroso, and it is evident that we must not be surprised at finding ny deficiencies or faults in such works, especially in the ier of them, nor even suffer ourselves to be withdrawn by the suit of what seems censurable from our devotion to what is hty.

Notwithstanding, in some chosen examples of pictures of kind, I will name three: Juliet and her Nurse; the Old neraire, and the Slave Ship: I do not admit that there are he time of their first appearing on the walls of the Royal demy, any demonstrably avoidable faults. I do not deny there may be, nay, that it is likely there are; but there is iving artist in Europe whose judgment might safely be taken the subject, or who could without arrogance affirm of any of such a picture, that it was wrong; I am perfectly willing llow, that the lemon yellow is not properly representative of yellow of the sky, that the loading of the color is in many es disagreeable, that many of the details are drawn with a 1 of imperfection different from what they would have in re, and that many of the parts fail of imitation, especially n uneducated eye. But no living authority is of weight ugh to prove that the virtues of the picture could have been ined at a less sacrifice, or that they are not worth the sacri; and though it is perfectly possible that such may be the and that what Turner has done may hereafter in some ects be done better, I believe myself that these works are at ime of their first appearing as perfect as those of Phidias or