ment of
art. It is strange that, with the great historical painters of Italy
before them, who had broken so boldly and indignantly from the trammels
of this notion, and shaken the very dust of it from their feet, the
succeeding landscape painters should have wasted their lives in
jugglery: but so it is, and so it will be felt, the more we look into
their works, that the deception of the senses was the great and first
end of all their art. To attain this they paid deep and serious
attention to effects of light and tone, and to the exact degree of
relief which material objects take against light and atmosphere; and
sacrificing every other truth to these, not necessarily, but because
they required no others for deception, they succeeded in rendering these
particular facts with a fidelity and force which, in the pictures that
have come down to us uninjured, are as yet unequalled, and never can be
surpassed. They painted their foregrounds with laborious industry,
covering them with details so as to render them deceptive to the
ordinary eye, regardless of beauty or truth in the details themselves;
they painted their trees with careful attention to their pitch of shade
against the sky, utterly regardless of all that is beautiful or
essential in the anatomy of their foliage and boughs: they painted their
distances with exquisite use of transparent color and aerial tone,
totally neglectful of all facts and forms which nature uses such color
and tone to relieve and adorn. They had neither love of nature, nor
feeling of her beauty; they looked for her coldest and most commonplace
effects, because they were easiest to imitate; and for her most vulgar
forms, because they were most easily to be recognized by the untaught
eyes of those whom alone they could hope to please; they did it, like
the Pharisee of old, to be seen of men, and they had their reward. They
do deceive and delight the unpractised eye; they will to all ages, as
long as their colors endure, be the standards of excellence with all,
who, ignorant of nature, claim to be thought learned in art. And they
will to all ages be, to those who have thorough love and knowledge of
the creation which they libel, instructive proofs of the limited number
and low character of the truths which are necessary, and the accumulated
multitude of pure, broad, bold falsehoods which are admissible in
pictures meant only to deceive.

There is of course more or less accuracy of knowledge and ex