to be, if we may use
the term, misrepresented. While speaking of the Claude glass, it will
not be amiss to notice a peculiarity. It shows a picture--when the
unaided eye will not; it heightens illumination--brings out the most
delicate lights, scarcely perceptible to the naked eye, and gives
greater power to the shades, yet preserves their delicacy. It seems
to annihilate all those rays of light, which, as it were, intercept
the picture--that come between the eye and the object. But to return
to colour--we say that it must, in the midst of its license, preserve
its naturalness--which it will do if it have a meaning in itself. But
when we are called upon to question what is the meaning of this or
that colour, how does its effect agree with the subject? why is it
outrageously yellow or white, or blue or red, or a jumble of all
these?--which are questions, we confess, that we and the public have
often asked, with regard to Turner's late pictures--we do not
acknowledge a naturalness--the license has been abused--not "sumpta
pudenter." It is not because the vividness of "a blade of grass or a
scarlet flower" shall be beyond the power of pigment, that a general
glare and obtrusion of such colours throughout a picture can be
justified. We are astonished that any man with eyes should see the
unnaturalness in colour of Salvator and Titian, and not see it in
Turner's recent pictures, where it is offensive because more glaring.
Those masters sacrificed, if it be a sacrifice, something to
repose--repose is _the_ thing to be sacrificed according to the
notions of too many of our modern schools. It is likewise singular,
after all the falsehoods which he asserts the old masters to have
painted, that he should speak of "imitation"--as their whole aim,
their sole intention to deceive; and yet he describes their pictures
as unlike nature in the detail and in the general as can be,
strangely missing their object--deception. We fear the truths,
particulars of which occupy the remainder of the volume--of earth,
water, skies, &c.--are very minute truths, which, whether true or
false, are of very little importance to art, unless it be to those
branches of art which may treat the whole of each particular truth
as the whole of a subject, a line of art that may produce a multitude
of works, like certain scenes of dramatic effect, surprising to see
once, but are soon powerless--can we hope to say of such, "decies
repetita placebunt?" They will be