ould be sorry to see it better. Copley Fielding's is remarkable
for its intricacy and elegance; it is, however, not free from
affectation, and, as has been before remarked, is always evidently
composed in the study. The execution is too rough and woolly; it is
wanting in simplicity, sharpness, and freshness,--above all in specific
character: not, however, in his middle distances, where the rounded
masses of forest and detached blasted trunks of fir are usually very
admirable. Cattermole has very grand conceptions of general form, but
wild and without substance, and therefore incapable of long maintaining
their attractiveness, especially lately, the execution having become in
the last degree coarse and affected. This is bitterly to be regretted,
for few of our artists would paint foliage better, if he would paint it
from nature, and with reverence.

Sec. 34. Hunt and Creswick. Green, how to be rendered expressive of light,
and offensive if otherwise.

Hunt, I think, fails, and fails only, in foliage; fails, as the
Daguerreotype does, from over-fidelity; for foliage will _not_ be
imitated, it must be reasoned out and suggested; yet Hunt is the only
man we have who can paint the real leaf green under sunlight, and, in
this respect, his trees are delicious,--summer itself. Creswick has
sweet feeling, and tries for the real green too, but, from want of
science in his shadows, ends in green paint instead of green light; in
mere local color, instead of color raised by sunshine. One example is
enough to show where the fault lies. In his picture of the Weald of
Kent, in the British Institution this year, there was a cottage in the
middle distance with white walls, and a red roof. The dark sides of the
white walls and of the roof were of the same color, a dark purple--wrong
for both. Repeated inaccuracies of this kind necessarily deprive even
the most brilliant color of all appearance of sunshine, and they are
much to be deprecated in Creswick, as he is one of the very few artists
who _do_ draw from nature and try for nature. Some of his thickets and
torrent-beds are most painfully studied, and yet he cannot draw a bough
nor a stone. I suspect he is too much in the habit of studying only
large views on the spot, and not of drawing small portions thoroughly. I
trust it will be seen that these, as all other remarks that I have made
throughout this volume on particular works, are not in depreciation of,
or unthankfulness