by him; but I believe even he could
scarcely contend with the magnificent _abandon_ of Harding's brush.
There is perhaps nothing which tells more in the drawing of water than
decisive and swift execution; for, in a rapid touch the hand naturally
falls into the very curve of projection which is the absolute truth;
while in slow finish, all precision of curve and character is certain to
be lost, except under the hand of an unusually powerful master. But
Harding has both knowledge and velocity, and the fall of his torrents is
beyond praise; impatient, chafing, substantial, shattering, crystalline,
and capricious; full of various form, yet all apparently instantaneous
and accidental, nothing conventional, nothing dependent upon parallel
lines or radiating curves; all broken up and dashed to pieces over the
irregular rock, and yet all in unity of motion. The color also of his
_falling_ and bright water is very perfect; but in the dark and level
parts of his torrents he has taken up a bad gray, which has hurt some of
his best pictures. His gray in shadows under rocks or dark reflections
is admirable; but it is when the stream is in full light, and unaffected
by reflections in distance, that he gets wrong. We believe that the
fault is in a want of expression of darkness in the color, making it
appear like a positive hue of the water, for which it is much too dead
and cold.

Harding seldom paints sea, and it is well for Stanfield that he does
not, or the latter would have to look to his crown. All that we have
seen from his hand is, as coast sea, quite faultless; we only wish he
would paint it more frequently; always, however, with a veto upon French
fishing-boats. In the Exhibition of 1842, he spoiled one of the most
superb pieces of seashore and sunset which modern art has produced, with
the pestilent square sail of one of these clumsy craft, which the eye
could not escape from.

Sec. 7. The sea of Copley Fielding. Its exceeding grace and rapidity.

Before passing to our great sea painter, we must again refer to the
works of Copley Fielding. It is with his sea as with his sky, he can
only paint one, and that an easy one, but it is, for all that, an
impressive and a true one. No man has ever given, with the same flashing
freedom, the race of a running tide under a stiff breeze, nor caught,
with the same grace and precision, the curvature of the breaking wave,
arrested or accelerated by the wind. The forward fling of his f