English parents his
training was essentially French, and he really belonged to the French
school, an associate of Delacroix. His study of the Venetians turned
his talent toward warm coloring, in which he excelled. In landscape
his broad handling was somewhat related to that of Constable, and from
the fact of their works appearing together in the Salon of 1824 they
are often spoken of as influencers of the modern French landscape
painters.

Turner (1775-1851) is the best known name in English art. His
celebrity is somewhat disproportionate to his real merits, though it
is impossible to deny his great ability. He was a man learned in all
the forms of nature and schooled in all the formulas of art; yet he
was not a profound lover of nature nor a faithful recorder of what
things he saw in nature, except in his early days. In the bulk of his
work he shows the traditions of Claude, with additions of his own. His
taste was classic (he possessed all the knowledge and the belongings
of the historical landscape), and he delighted in great stretches of
country broken by sea-shores, rivers, high mountains, fine buildings,
and illumined by blazing sunlight and gorgeous skies. His composition
was at times grotesque in imagination; his light was usually
bewildering in intensity and often unrelieved by shadows of sufficient
depth; his tone was sometimes faulty; and in color he was not always
harmonious, but inclined to be capricious, uneven, showing fondness
for arbitrary schemes of color. The object of his work seems to have
been to dazzle, to impress with a wilderness of lines and hues, to
overawe by imposing scale and grandeur. His paintings are impressive,
decoratively splendid, but they often smack of the stage, and are more
frequently grandiloquent than grand. His early works, especially in
water-colors, where he shows himself a follower of Girtin, are much
better than his later canvases in oil, many of which have changed
color. The water-colors are carefully done, subdued in color, and true
in light. From 1802, or thereabouts, to 1830 was his second period,
in which Italian composition and much color were used. The last twenty
years of his life he inclined to the _bizarre_, and turned his
canvases into almost incoherent color masses. He had an artistic
feeling for composition, linear perspective, and the sweep of horizon
lines; skies and hills he knew and drew with power; color he
comprehended only as decoration; and light he