ut of the sun; and this weak and secondary shadow is all that we
ever find in the Italian masters, as indicative of sunshine. Even Cuyp
and Berghem, though they know thoroughly well what they are about in
their foregrounds, forget the principle in their distances; and though
in Claude's seaports, where he has plain architecture to deal with, he
gives us something like real shadows along the stones, the moment we
come to ground and foliage with lateral light, away go the shadows and
the sun together. In the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, in our own
gallery, the trunks of the trees between the water-wheel and the white
figure in the middle distance, are dark and visible; but their shadows
are scarcely discernible on the ground, and are quite vague and lost in
the building. In nature, every bit of the shadow would have been darker
than the darkest part of the trunks, and both on the ground and building
would have been defined and conspicuous; while the trunks themselves
would have been faint, confused, and indistinguishable, in their
illumined parts, from the grass or distance. So in Poussin's Phocion,
the shadow of the stick on the stone in the right-hand corner, is shaded
off and lost, while you see the stick plain all the way. In nature's
sunlight it would have been the direct reverse--you would have seen the
shadow black and sharp all the way down, but you would have had to look
for the stick, which in all probability would in several places have
been confused with the stone behind it.

And so throughout the works of Claude, Poussin, and Salvator, we shall
find, especially in their conventional foliage, and unarticulated
barbarisms of rock, that their whole sum and substance of chiaroscuro is
merely the gradation and variation which nature gives in the _body_ of
her shadows, and that all which they do to express sunshine, she does to
vary shade. They take only one step, while she always takes two;
marking, in the first place, with violent decision, the great transition
from sun to shade, and then varying the shade itself with a thousand
gentle gradations and double shadows, in themselves equivalent, and more
than equivalent, to all that the old masters did for their entire
chiaroscuro.

Sec. 5. The perfection of Turner's works in this respect.

Now if there be one principle, or secret more than another, on which
Turner depends for attaining brilliancy of light, it is his clear and
exquisite drawing of the _shadows_