round above the cattle, between the
head of the brown cow and the tail of the white one, is well
articulated, just where it turns into shade."

After the entire failure of all artists that ever lived before Turner
in land and skies, we are prepared to find that they had not the least
idea of water. When they thought they painted water, in fact, they
were like "those happier children, sliding on dry ground," and had not
the chance of wetting a foot. Water, too, is a thing to be anatomized,
a sort of rib-fluidity. The moving, transparent water, in shallow and
in depth, of Vandervelde and Backhuysen, is not the least like water;
they are men who "libelled the sea." Many of our moderns--Stanfield in
particular--seem naturally web-footed; but the real Triton of the sea,
as he was Titan of the earth, is Turner. To our own eyes, in this
respect, he stands indebted to the engraver; for we do not remember a
single sea-piece by Turner, in water-colour or oil, in which the water
is _liquid_. What it is like, in the picture of the Slave-ship, which
is considered one of his very finest productions, we defy any one to
tell. We are led to guess it is meant for water, by the strange fish
that take their pastime. A year or two ago were exhibited two
sea-pieces, of nearly equal size, at the British Institution, by
Vandervelde and Turner. It was certainly one of Turner's best; but how
inferior was the water and the sky to the water and sky in
Vandervelde! In Turner they were both rocky. We say not this to the
disparagement of Turner's genius. He had not studied these elements as
did Vandervelde. The two painters ought not to be compared together;
and we humbly think that any man who should pronounce of Vandervelde
and Backhuysen, that they "libelled the sea," convicts himself of a
wondrous lack of taste and feeling. Of their works he thus speaks--"As
it is, I believe there is scarcely such another instance to be found
in the history of man, of the epidemic aberration of mind into which
multitudes fall by infection, as is furnished by the value set upon
the works of these men." Of water, he says--"Nothing can hinder water
from being a reflecting medium but dry dust or filth of some kind on
its surface. Dirty water, if the foul matter be dissolved or suspended
in the liquid, reflects just as clearly and sharply as pure water,
only the image is coloured by the hue of the mixed matter, and becomes
comparatively brown or dark." We entirely den