I am at present
speaking. To handle the brush freely, and to paint grass and weeds with
accuracy enough to satisfy the eye, are accomplishments which a year or
two's practice will give any man; but to trace among the grass and weeds
those mysteries of invention and combination, by which nature appeals to
the intellect--to render the delicate fissure, and descending curve, and
undulating shadow of the mouldering soil, with gentle and fine finger,
like the touch of the rain itself--to find even in all that appears most
trifling or contemptible, fresh evidence of the constant working of the
Divine power "for glory and for beauty," and to teach it and proclaim it
to the unthinking and the unregardless--this, as it is the peculiar
province and faculty of the master-mind, so it is the peculiar duty
which is demanded of it by the Deity.

Sec. 16. The ground of Cuyp.

Sec. 17. And of Claude.

Sec. 18. The entire weakness and childishness of the latter.

Sec. 19. Compared with the work of Turner.

It would take me no reasonable nor endurable time, if I were to point
out one half of the various kinds and classes of falsehood which the
inventive faculties of the old masters succeeded in originating, in the
drawing of foregrounds. It is not this man, nor that man, nor one school
nor another; all agree in entire repudiation of everything resembling
facts, and in the high degree of absurdity of what they substitute for
them. Even Cuyp, who evidently saw and studied _near_ nature, as an
artist should do--not fishing for idealities, but taking what nature
gave him, and thanking her for it--even he appears to have supposed that
the drawing of the earth might be trusted to chance or imagination, and,
in consequence, strews his banks with lumps of dough, instead of stones.
Perhaps, however, the "beautiful foregrounds" of Claude afford the most
remarkable instances of childishness and incompetence of all. That of
his morning landscape, with the large group of trees and high
single-arched bridge, in the National Gallery, is a pretty fair example
of the kind of error which he constantly falls into. I will not say
anything of the agreeable composition of the three banks, rising one
behind another from the water. I merely affirm that it amounts to a
demonstration that all three were painted in the artist's study, without
any reference to nature whatever. In fact, there is quite enough
intrinsic evidence in each of them to prove this, se