cenery, and hint at the glacier so slightly, that they do
not feel the necessity of careful study of its forms. Habits of
exaggeration increase the evil: I have seen a sketch from nature, by one
of the most able of our landscape painters, in which a cloud had been
mistaken for a snowy summit, and the hint thus taken exaggerated, as was
likely, into an enormous mass of impossible height, and unintelligent
form, when the mountain itself, for which the cloud had been mistaken,
though subtending an angle of about eighteen or twenty degrees, instead
of the fifty attributed to it, was of a form so exquisite that it might
have been a profitable lesson truly studied to Phidias. Nothing but
failure can result from such methods of sketching, nor have I ever seen
a single instance of an earnest study of snowy mountains by any one.
Hence, wherever they are introduced, their drawing is utterly
unintelligent, the forms being those of white rocks, or of rocks lightly
powdered with snow, showing sufficiently that not only the painters have
never studied the mountain carefully from below, but that they have
never climbed into the snowy region. Harding's rendering of the high
Alps (_vide_ the engraving of Chamonix, and of the Wengern Alp, in the
illustrations to Byron) is best; but even he shows no perception of the
real anatomy. Stanfield paints only white rocks instead of snow. Turner
invariably avoids the difficulty, though he has shown himself capable of
grappling with it in the ice of the Liber Studiorum, (Mer de Glace,)
which is very cold and slippery and very like ice; but of the crusts and
wreaths of the higher snow he has taken no cognizance. Even the
vignettes to Rogers's Poems fail in this respect. It would be vain to
attempt in this place to give any detailed account of the phenomena of
the upper snows; but it may be well to note those general principles
which every artist ought to keep in mind when he has to paint an Alp.

Sec. 20. General principles of its forms on the Alps.

Snow is modified by the under forms of the hill in some sort, as dress
is by the anatomy of the human frame. And as no dress can be well laid
on without conceiving the body beneath, so no Alp can be drawn unless
its under form is conceived first, and its snow laid on afterwards.

Every high Alp has as much snow upon it as it can hold or carry. It is
not, observe, a mere coating of snow of given depth throughout, but it
is snow loaded on until the ro