yp, which have never been equalled in art. But
I much doubt if there be a single _bright_ Cuyp in the world, which,
taken as a whole, does not present many glaring solecisms in tone. I
have not seen many fine pictures of his, which were not utterly spoiled
by the vermilion dress of some principal figure, a vermilion totally
unaffected and unwarmed by the golden hue of the rest of the picture;
and, what is worse, with little distinction, between its own illumined
and shaded parts, so that it appears altogether out of sunshine, the
color of a bright vermilion in dead, cold daylight. It is possible that
the original color may have gone down in all cases, or that these parts
may have been villanously repainted: but I am the rather disposed to
believe them genuine, because even throughout the best of his pictures
there are evident recurrences of the same kind of solecism in other
colors--greens for instance--as in the steep bank on the right of the
largest picture in the Dulwich Gallery; and browns, as in the lying cow
in the same picture, which is in most visible and painful contrast with
the one standing beside it, the flank of the standing one being bathed
in breathing sunshine, and the reposing one laid in with as dead,
opaque, and lifeless brown as ever came raw from a novice's pallet. And
again, in that marked 83, while the figures on the right are walking in
the most precious light, and those just beyond them in the distance
leave a furlong or two of pure visible sunbeams between us and them, the
cows in the centre are entirely deprived, poor things, of both light and
air. And these failing parts, though they often escape the eye when we
are near the picture and able to dwell upon what is beautiful in it, yet
so injure its whole effect that I question if there be many Cuyps in
which vivid colors occur, which will not lose their effect, and become
cold and flat at a distance of ten or twelve paces, retaining their
influence only when the eye is close enough to rest on the right parts
without including the whole. Take, for instance, the large one in our
National Gallery, seen from the opposite door, where the black cow
appears a great deal nearer than the dogs, and the golden tones of the
distance look like a sepia drawing rather than like sunshine, owing
chiefly to the utter want of aerial grays indicated through them.

Sec. 20. Turner is not so perfect in parts--far more so in the whole.

Now, there is no instance i