wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct lighting up the infinity of its arches like the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano and graceful darkness of its ilex grove rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of rain-cloud in deep, palpitating azure, half ether and half dew. The noon-day sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it color, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the re cesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers. dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the gray walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheetlightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless masses of dark rock-dark though flushed with scarlet lichen,-casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, and over all-the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea. Tell me who is likest this, Poussin or Turner? Not in his most daring and dazzling efforts could Turner himself come Turner him liancy to na ar it; but you could not at the time have thought or rememred the work of any other man as having the remotest hue or resemblance of what you saw. Nor am I speak'is inferior in ing of what is uncommon or unnatural; there is no climate, no place, and scarcely an hour, in ich nature does not exhibit color which no mortal effort n imitate or approach. For all our artificial pigments are, en when seen under the same circumstances, dead and lightis beside her living color; the green of a growing leaf, the arlet of a fresh flower, no art nor expedient can reach ; but addition to this, nature exhibits her hues under an inasity of sunlight which trebles their brilliancy, while the inter, deprived of this splendid aid, works still with what is tually a gray shadow compared to the force of nature's color. ke a blade of grass and a scarlet flower, and place them so as receive sunlight beside the brightest canvas that ever left irner's easel, and the picture will be extinguished. So far ɔm out-facing nature, he does not, as far as mere vividness of lor goes, one-half reach her ;—but does he use this brilliancy color on objects to which it does not properly belong? Let compare his works in this respect with a few instances from e old masters. . Impossible cian; There is, on the left hand side of Salvator's Mercury and e Woodman in our National Gallery, something, without oubt intended for a rocky mountain, in the middle distance, near enough for all its fissures and crags to be disors of Salvator, tinctly visible, or, rather, for a great many awkward scratches of the brush over it to be visible, which, ough not particularly representative either of one thing or nother, are without doubt intended to be symbolical of rocks. ow no mountain in full light, and near enough for its details I crag to be seen, is without great variety of delicate color. alvator has painted it throughout without one instant of variaon; but this, I suppose, is simplicity and generalization ;-let pass but what is the color? Pure sky blue, without one grain gray, or any modifying hue whatsoever;-the same brush hich had just given the bluest parts of the sky, has been more aded at the same part of the pallet, and the whole mountain rown in with unmitigated ultramarine. Now mountains only can become pure blue when there is so much air between us and them that they become mere flat, dark shades, every detail being totally lost they become blue when they become air, and not till then. Consequently this part of Salvator's painting, being of hills perfectly clear and near, with all their details visible, is, as far as color is concerned, broad, bold falsehood-the direct assertion of direct impossibility. In the whole range of Turner's works, recent or of old date, you will not find an instance of anything near enough to have details visible, painted in sky blue. Wherever Turner gives blue, there he gives atmosphere; it is air, not object. Blue he gives to his sea; so does nature ;-blue he gives, sapphire-deep, to his extreme distance; so does nature;-blue he gives to the misty shadows and hollows of his hills; so does nature: but blue he gives not, where detail and illumined surface are visible; as he comes into light and character, so he breaks into warmth and varied hue; nor is there in one of his works, and I speak of the Academy pictures especially, one touch of cold color which is not to be accounted for, and proved right and full of meaning. I do not say that Salvator's distance is not artist-like; both in that, and in the yet more glaringly false distances of Titian above alluded to, and in hundreds of others of equal boldness of exaggeration, I can take delight, and perhaps should be sorry to see them other than they are; but it is somewhat singular to hear people talking of Turner's exquisite care and watchfulness in color as false, while they receive such cases of preposterous and audacious fiction with the most generous and simple credulity. § 5. Poussin, and Claude. Again, in the upper sky of the picture of Nicolas Poussin, before noticed, the clouds are of a very fine clear olive-green, about the same tint as the brightest parts of the trees beneath them. They cannot have altered, (or else the trees must have been painted in gray,) for the hue is harmonious and well united with the rest of the picture, and the blue and white in the centre of the sky are still fresh and pure. Now a green sky in open and illumined distance is very frequent, and very beautiful; but rich olive-green clouds, as far as I am acquainted with nature, are a piece of color in which he is not apt to indulge. You will be puzzled to show me such thing in the recent works of Turner.* Again, take any im-ortant group of trees, I do not care whose-Claude's, Salvaor's, or Poussin's-with lateral light (that in the Marriage of saac and Rebecca, or Gaspar's sacrifice of Isaac, for instance :) Can it be seriously supposed that those murky browns and melncholy greens are representative of the tints of leaves under ill noonday sun? I know that you cannot help looking upon l these pictures as pieces of dark relief against a light wholly roceeding from the distances; but they are nothing of the ind-they are noon and morning effects with full lateral light. e so kind as to match the color of a leaf in the sun (the darkst you like) as nearly as you can, and bring your matched olor and set it beside one of these groups of trees, and take a lade of common grass, and set it beside any part of the fullest ght of their foregrounds, and then talk about the truth of olor of the old masters! And let not arguments respecting the sublimity or fidelity of mpression be brought forward here. I have nothing whatever o do with this at present. I am not talking about what is subme, but about what is true. People attack Turner on this round ;—they never speak of beauty or sublimity with respect him, but of nature and truth, and let them support their own vorite masters on the same grounds. Perhaps I may have the ery deepest veneration for the feeling of the old masters, but I ust not let it influence me now-my business is to match olors, not to talk sentiment. Neither let it be said that I am oing too much into details, and that general truths may be btained by local falsehood. Truth is only to be measured by * There is perhaps nothing more characteristic of a great colorist than s power of using greens in strange places without their being felt as such, - at least than a constant preference of green gray to purple gray. And is hue of Poussin's clouds would have been perfectly agreeable and allow›le, had there been gold or crimson enough in the rest of the picture to ave thrown it into gray. It is only because the lower clouds are pure hite and blue, and because the trees are of the same color as the clouds, at the cloud color becomes false. There is a fine instance of a sky, green itself, but turned gray by the opposition of warm color, in Turner's evonport with the Dockyards. close comparison of actual facts; we may talk forever about it in generals, and prove nothing. We cannot tell what effect falsehood may produce on this or that person, but we can very well tell what is false and what is not, and if it produce on our senses the effect of truth, that only demonstrates their imperfection and inaccuracy, and need of cultivation. Turner's color is glaring to one person's sensations, and beautiful to another's. This proves nothing. Poussin's color is right to one, soot to another. This proves nothing. There is no means of arriving at any conclusion but close comparison of both with the known and demonstrable hues of nature, and this comparison will invariably turn Claude or Poussin into blackness, and even Turner into gray. Whatever depth of gloom may seem to invest the objects of a real landscape, yet a window with that landscape seen through it, will invariably appear a broad space of light as compared with the shade of the room walls; and this single circumstance may prove to us both the intensity and the diffusion of daylight in open air, and the necessity, if a picture is to be truthful in effect of color, that it should tell as a broad space of graduated illumination-not, as do those of the old masters, as a patchwork of black shades. Their works are nature in mourning weeds,—ουδ' ἑν ἡλίῳ καθαρῷ τεθραμμένοι, ἀλλ' ὑπὸ συμμιγει σκιᾷ. $6. Turner's translation of colors. It is true that there are, here and there, in the Academy pictures, passages in which Turner has translated the unattainable intensity of one tone of color, into the attainable pitch of a higher one the golden green for instance, of intense sunshine on verdure, into pure yellow, because he knows it to be impossible, with any mixture of blue whatsoever, to give faithfully its relative intensity of light, and Turner always will have his light and shade right, whatever it costs him in color. But he does this in rare cases, and even then over very small spaces; and I should be obliged to his critics if they would go out to some warm, mossy green bank in full summer sunshine, and try to reach its tone; and when they find, as find they will, Indian yellow and chrome look dark beside it, let them tell me candidly which is nearest truth, the gold of Turner, or the mourning and murky olive browns and verdigris |