principal reasons why artists call Switzerland
"unpicturesque." There may perhaps be, in the space of a Swiss valley
which comes into a picture, from five to ten millions of well grown
pines.[94] Every one of these pines must be drawn before the scene can
be. And a pine cannot be represented by a round stroke, nor by an
upright one, nor even by an angular one; no conventionalism will express
a pine; it must be legitimately drawn, with a light side and a dark
side, and a soft gradation from the top downwards, or it does not look
like a pine at all. Most artists think it not desirable to choose a
subject which involves the drawing of ten millions of trees; because,
supposing they could even do four or five in a minute, and worked for
ten hours a day, their picture would still take them ten years before
they had finished its pine forests. For this, and other similar reasons,
it is declared usually that Switzerland is ugly and unpicturesque; but
that is not so; it is only that _we_ cannot paint it. If we could, it
would be as interesting on the canvas as it is in reality; and a painter
of fruit and flowers might just as well call a human figure
unpicturesque, because it was to him unmanageable, as the ordinary
landscape-effect painter speak in depreciation of the Alps.

Sec. 41. It is not probable that any subjects such as we have just been
describing, involving a necessity of ten years' labor, will be executed
by the modern landscape school,--at least, until its Pre-Raphaelitic
tendencies become much more developed than they are yet; nor was it
desirable that they should have been by Turner, whose fruitful invention
would have been unwisely arrested for a length of time on any single
subject, however beautiful. But with his usual certainty of perception,
he fastened at once on this character of "quantity," as the thing to be
expressed, in one way or another, in all grand mountain-drawing; and the
subjects of his on which I have chiefly dwelt in the First Volume
(chapter on the Inferior Mountains, Sec. 16, &c.) are distinguished from
the work of other painters in nothing so much as in this redundance.
Beautiful as they are in color, graceful in fancy, powerful in
execution,--in none of these things do they stand so much alone as in
plain, calculable quantity; he having always on the average twenty trees
or rocks where other people have only one, and winning his victories not
more by skill of generalship than by overwhelming