nd
the object, and in doing so diminish, your distance, for it is
impossible you should see so far through mist as through clear air; or,
if you keep an impression of clear air, you bring the object close to
the observer, diminish its size in proportion, and if the aerial colors,
excessive blues, etc., be retained, represent an impossibility.

Sec. 17. Want of this decision in Claude.

Take Claude's distance (in No. 244, Dulwich Gallery,)[53] on the right
of the picture. It is as pure blue as ever came from the pallet, laid on
thick; you cannot see through it, there is not the slightest vestige of
transparency or filminess about it, and its edge is soft and blunt.
Hence, if it be meant for near hills, the blue is impossible, and the
want of details impossible, in the clear atmosphere indicated through
the whole picture. If it be meant for extreme distance, the blunt edge
is impossible, and the opacity is impossible. I do not know a single
distance of the Italian school to which the same observation is not
entirely applicable, except, perhaps, one or two of Nicholas Poussin's.
They always involve, under any supposition whatsoever, at least two
impossibilities.

Sec. 18. The perpetual rendering of it by Turner.

I need scarcely mention in particular any more of the works of Turner,
because there is not one of his mountain distances in which these facts
are not fully exemplified. Look at the last vignette--the Farewell, in
Rogers's Italy; observe the excessive sharpness of all the edges, almost
amounting to lines, in the distance, while there is scarcely one
decisive edge in the foreground. Look at the hills of the distance in
the Dunstaffnage, Glencoe, and Loch Achray, (illustrations to Scott,) in
the latter of which the left-hand side of the Benvenue is actually
marked with a dark line. In fact, Turner's usual mode of executing these
passages is perfectly evident in all his drawings; it is not often that
we meet with a very broad dash of wet color in his finished works, but
in these distances, as we before saw of his shadows, all the effect has
been evidently given by a dash of very moist pale color, probably
turning the paper upside down, so that a very firm edge may be left at
the top of the mountain as the color dries. And in the Battle of Marengo
we find the principle carried so far as to give nothing more than actual
outline for the representation of the extreme distance, while all the
other hills in the pic