this respect. As for our oil pictures,
the less that is said about them the better. Callcott has the truest
aim; but not having any eye for color, it is impossible for him to
succeed in tone.

CHAPTER II.

OF TRUTH OF COLOR.

Sec. 1. Observations on the color of G. Poussin's La Riccia.

There is, in the first room of the National Gallery, a landscape
attributed to Gaspar Poussin, called sometimes Aricia, sometimes Le or
La Riccia, according to the fancy of catalogue printers. Whether it can
be supposed to resemble the ancient Aricia, now La Riccia, close to
Albano, I will not take upon me to determine, seeing that most of the
towns of these old masters are quite as like one place as another; but,
at any rate, it is a town on a hill, wooded with two-and-thirty bushes,
of very uniform size, and possessing about the same number of leaves
each. These bushes are all painted in with one dull opaque brown,
becoming very slightly greenish towards the lights, and discover in one
place a bit of rock, which of course would in nature have been cool and
gray beside the lustrous hues of foliage, and which, therefore, being
moreover completely in shade, is consistently and scientifically painted
of a very clear, pretty, and positive brick-red, the only thing like
color in the picture. The foreground is a piece of road, which in order
to make allowance for its greater nearness, for its being completely in
light, and, it may be presumed, for the quantity of vegetation usually
present on carriage-roads, is given in a very cool green gray, and the
truth of the picture is completed by a number of dots in the sky on the
right, with a stalk to them, of a sober and similar brown.

Sec. 2. As compared with the actual scene.

Not long ago, I was slowly descending this very bit of carriage-road,
the first turn after you leave Albano, not a little impeded by the
worthy successors of the ancient prototypes of Veiento.[19] It had been
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 ros