examination, when we are considering the ideal of
color.

Sec. 18. His early works are false in color.

The above remarks have been made entirely with reference to the recent
Academy pictures, which have been chiefly attacked for their color. I by
no means intend them to apply to the early works of Turner, those which
the enlightened newspaper critics are perpetually talking about as
characteristic of a time when Turner was "really great." He is, and was,
really great, from the time when he first could hold a brush, but he
never was so great as he is now. The Crossing the Brook, glorious as it
is as a composition, and perfect in all that is most desirable and most
ennobling in art, is scarcely to be looked upon as a piece of color; it
is an agreeable, cool, gray rendering of space and form, but it is not
color; if it be regarded as such, it is thoroughly false and vapid, and
very far inferior to the tones of the same kind given by Claude. The
reddish brown in the foreground of the Fall of Carthage, with all
diffidence be it spoken, is, as far as my feelings are competent to
judge, crude, sunless, and in every way wrong; and both this picture and
the Building of Carthage, though this latter is far the finer of the
two, are quite unworthy of Turner as a colorist.

Sec. 19. His drawings invariably perfect.

Not so with the drawings; these, countless as they are, from the
earliest to the latest, though presenting an unbroken chain of
increasing difficulty overcome, and truth illustrated, are all,
according to their aim, equally faultless as to color. Whatever we have
hitherto said, applies to them in its fullest extent; though each, being
generally the realization of some effect actually seen, and realized but
once, requires almost a separate essay. As a class, they are far quieter
and chaster than the Academy pictures, and, were they better known,
might enable our connoisseurs to form a somewhat more accurate judgment
of the intense study of nature on which all Turner's color is based.

Sec. 20. The subjection of his system of color to that of chiaroscuro.

One point only remains to be noted respecting his system of color
generally--its entire subordination to light and shade, a subordination
which there is no need to prove here, as every engraving from his
works--and few are unengraved--is sufficient demonstration of it. I have
before shown the inferiority and unimportance in nature of color, as a
truth, compa