ness as have never in any wise been equalled, and as might serve him for a secure foundation in all after experiments. Of the quantity and precision of his details, the drawings made for Hakewell's Italy are singular examples, as well as some of the drawings of Swiss scenery in the possession of F. H. Fawkes, Esq., of Farnley.

About the time of their production, the artist seems to have felt that he had done either all that could be done, or all that was necessary, in that manner, and began to reach after something beyond it. The element of colour begins to mingle with his work, and in the first efforts to reconcile his intense feeling for it with his careful form, several anomalies begin to be visible, and some unfortunate or uninteresting works necessarily belong to the period. The England drawings, which are very characteristic of it, are exceedingly unequal, some, as the Oakhampton, Kilgarren, Alnwick, and Llanthony, being among his finest works; others, as the Windsor, from Eton, the Eton College, and the Bedford, showing coarseness, and conventionality.

mestic sub

rum.

I do not know at what time the painter first went abroad, but § 40. The dosome of the Swiss drawings above named were made in 1804 or 1806; jects of the and among the earliest of the series of the Liber Studiorum (dates Liber Studio1808, 1809), occur the magnificent Mont St. Gothard, and Little Devil's Bridge. Now it is remarkable that after his acquaintance with this scenery, so congenial in almost all respects with the energy of his mind, and supplying him with materials of which in these two subjects, and in the Chartreuse, and several others afterwards, he showed both his entire appreciation and command, the proportion of English to foreign subjects should in the rest of the work be more than two to one; and that those English subjects should be, many of them, of a kind peculiarly simple, and of every-day occurrence; such as the Pembury Mill, the FarmYard composition with the white horse, that with the cocks and pigs, Hedging and Ditching, Watercress Gatherers (scene at Twickenham), and the beautiful and solemn rustic subject called "Watermill:" and that the architectural subjects, instead of being taken, as might have been expected of an artist so fond of treating effects of extended space, from some of the enormous continental masses, are almost exclusively British; Rivaulx, Holy Island,

a

1

Dumblain, Dunstanborough, Chepstow, St. Katherine's, Greenwich Hospital, an English Parish Church, a Saxon ruin, and an exquisite reminiscence of the English lowland castle in the pastoral with the brook, wooden bridge, and wild duck; to all of which we have nothing foreign to oppose but three slight, ill-considered, and unsatisfactory subjects, from Basle, Lauffenbourg, and Thun: and, farther, not only is the preponderance of subject British, but of affection also; for it is strange with what fulness and completion the home subjects are treated in comparison with the greater part of the foreign ones. Compare the figures and sheep in the Hedging and Ditching, and the East Gate, Winchelsea, together with the near leafage, with the puzzled foreground and inappropriate figures of the Lake of Thun; or the cattle and road of the St. Catherine's Hill, with the foreground of the Bonneville; or the exquisite figure with the sheaf of corn in the Watermill, with the vintagers of the Grenoble subject.

In his foliage the same predilections are remarkable. Reminiscences of English willows by the brooks, and English forest glades, mingle even with the heroic foliage of the Æsacus and Hesperie, and the Cephalus; into the pine, whether of Switzerland or the glorious Stone, he cannot enter, or enters at his peril, like Ariel. Those of the Valley of Chamounix are fine masses, better pines than other people's, but not a bit like pines for all that; he feels his weakness, and tears them off the distant mountains with the mercilessness of an avalanche. The Stone pines of the two Italian compositions are fine in their arrangement, but they are very pitiful pines; the glory of the Alpine rose he never touches; he mounches chestnuts with no relish; never has learned to like olives; and, in the foreground of the Grenoble Alps, is like many other great men, overthrown by the vine.

I adduce these evidences of Turner's nationality (and innumerable others might be given if need were), not as proofs of weakness, but of power; not so much as testifying want of perception in foreign lands, as strong hold on his own; for I am sure that no artist who has not this hold upon his own will ever get good out of any other. Keeping this principle in mind, it is instructive to observe the depth and solemnity which Turner's feeling acquired from the scenery of the continent, the keen appreciation up to a certain point of all that is locally characteristic, and the ready seizure for future use of all valuable material.

§ 41. Turner's painting of French and

Of all foreign countries he has most entirely entered into the spirit of France: partly because here he found more fellowship of scene with his own England; partly because an amount of thought scape. The

Swiss land

latter defi

which will miss of Italy or Switzerland will fathom France; partly cient.
because there is in the French foliage and forms of ground much
that is especially congenial with his own peculiar choice of form.
To what cause it is owing I cannot tell, nor is it generally allowed
or felt; but of the fact I am certain, that for grace of stem and
perfection of form in their transparent foliage, the French trees are
altogether unmatched; and their modes of grouping and massing
are so perfectly and constantly beautiful, that I think, of all
countries for educating an artist to the perception of grace, France
bears the bell; and that not romantic nor mountainous France, not
the Vosges, nor Auvergne, nor Provence, but lowland France,
Picardy and Normandy, the valleys of the Loire and Seine, and
even the district, so thoughtlessly and mindlessly abused by
English travellers as uninteresting, traversed between Calais and
Dijon; of which there is not a single valley but is full of the most
lovely pictures, nor a mile from which the artist may not receive
instruction; the district immediately about Sens being perhaps the
most valuable, from the grandeur of its lines of poplars, and the
unimaginable finish and beauty of the tree forms in the two great
avenues without the walls. Of this kind of beauty Turner was
the first to take cognizance, and he still remains the only, but in
himself the sufficient, painter of French landscape. One of the
most beautiful examples is the drawing of trees engraved for the
Keepsake, now in the possession of B. G. Windus, Esq.; the
drawings made to illustrate the scenery of the Rivers of France
supply instances of the most varied character.

The artist appears, until very lately, rather to have taken from Switzerland thoughts and general conceptions of size and of grand form and effect to be used in his after compositions, than to have attempted the seizing of its local character. This was beforehand to be expected from the utter physical impossibility of rendering

§ 42. His rendering of Italian character still less success

ful. His large compositions how failing.

certain effects of Swiss scenery, and the monotony and unmanageableness of others. Of the drawings above alluded to in the possession of F. H. Fawkes, Esq., I shall give account hereafter; they are not altogether successful, but the manner of their deficiency cannot be described in my present space. The Hannibal passing the Alps, in its present state, exhibits nothing but a heavy shower, and a crowd of people getting wet; another picture in the artist's gallery, of a Berg fall, is most masterly and interesting, but more daring than agreeable. The "Snow-storm, avalanche, and inundation," is one of his mightiest works, but the amount of mountain drawing in it is less than of cloud and effect; the subjects in the Liber Studiorum are on the whole the most intensely felt, and next to them the vignettes to Rogers's Poems, and Italy. Of some recent drawings of Swiss subjects I shall speak presently.

The effect of Italy upon his mind is very puzzling. On the one hand it gave him the solemnity and power which are manifested in the historical compositions of the Liber Studiorum, more especially the Rizpah, the Cephalus, the scene from the Fairy Queen, and the Esacus and Hesperie; on the other, he seems never to have entered thoroughly into the spirit of Italy, and the materials he obtained there were afterwards but awkwardly introduced in his large compositions.

Of these there are very few at all worthy of him; none but the Liber Studiorum subjects are thoroughly great, and these are great because there is in them the seriousness, without the materials, of other countries and times. There is nothing particularly indicative of Palestine in the Barley Harvest of the Rizpah, nor in those round and awful trees; only the solemnity of the south in the lifting of the near burning moon. The rocks of the Jason may be seen in any quarry of Warwickshire sandstone. Jason himself has not a bit of Greek about him; he is a simple warrior of no period in particular, nay, I think there is something of the nineteenth century about his legs. When local character of this classical kind is attempted, the painter is visibly cramped; awkward resemblances to Claude testify the want of his usual forceful originality: in the Tenth Plague of Egypt, he makes us think of Belzoni rather than of Moses; the Fifth is a total failure; the pyramids look like brick-kilns, and the fire running along the ground like the burning of manure. The realization of the Tenth Plague, now in his gallery, is finer than the study, but still uninteresting; and of the large compositions which have much of Italy in them, the greater part are overwhelmed with quantity, and deficient in emotion. The Crossing the Brook is one of the best of these hybrid pictures; incomparable in its tree drawing, it yet leaves us doubtful where we are to look and what we are to feel; it is northern in its colour, southern in its foliage, Italy in its details, and England in its sensations, without the grandeur of the one or the cheerfulness of the other.

The two Carthages are mere rationalizations of Claude; one of them excessively bad in colour, the other a grand thought, and yet one of the kind which does no one any good, because everything in it is reciprocally sacrificed; the foliage is sacrificed to the architecture, the architecture to the water, the water is neither sea, nor river, nor lake, nor brook, nor canal, and savours of Regent's Park; the foreground is uncomfortable ground, let on building leases. So, the Caligula's Bridge, Temple of Jupiter, Departure of Regulus, Ancient Italy, Cicero's Villa, and such others, come they from whose hand they may, I class under the general head of "nonsense pictures." There never can be any wholesome feeling developed in these preposterous accumulations, and where the artist's feeling fails, his art follows; so that the worst possible examples of Turner's colour are found in pictures of this class. In one or two instances he has broken through the conventional rules, and then is always fine, as in the Hero and Leander; but in general the picture rises in value as it approaches to a view, as the Fountain of Fallacy, a piece of rich Northern Italy, with some fairy waterworks; this picture was unrivalled in colour once, but is now a mere wreck. So also the Rape of Proserpine, though it is singular that in his Academy pictures even his simplicity fails of reaching ideality: in this picture of Proserpine the nature is not the grand nature of all time, it is indubitably modern1, and we are perfectly electrified at anybody's being

1 This passage seems at variance with what has been said of the necessity of painting present times and objects. It is not so. A great painter makes out of VOL. I.

K