incomprehensible, except where across the labyrinth and mystery of the dazzling light and dream-like shadow, falls, close to us, some solitary spray, some wreath of two or three motionless large leaves, the type and embodying of all that in the rest we feel and imagine, but can never see. Now, with thus much of nature in your mind, go to Gaspar Poussin's 'View near Albano.' It is the very subject to unite all these effects, a sloping bank shaded with intertwined forest. And what has Gaspar given us? A mass of smooth, opaque, varnished brown, without one interstice, one change of hue, or any vestige of leafy structure, in its interior, or in those parts of it, I should say, which are intended to represent interior; but out of it, over it rather, at regular intervals, we have circular groups of greenish touches, always the same in size, shape, and distance from each other, containing so exactly the same number of touches each, that you cannot tell one from another. There are eight or nine and thirty of them, laid over each other like fish-scales; the shade being most carefully made darker and darker as it recedes from each until it comes to the edge of the next, against which it cuts in the same sharp circular line, and then begins to decline again, until the canvas is covered, with about as much intelligence or feeling of art as a housepainter has in marbling a wainscot, or a weaver in repeating an ornamental pattern. What is there in this, which the most determined prejudice in favour of the old masters can for a moment suppose to resemble trees? It is exactly what the most ignorant beginner, trying to make a complete drawing, would lay down; exactly the conception of trees which we have in the works of our worst drawing-masters, where the shade is laid on with the black lead and stump, and every human power exerted to make it look like a kitchen grate well polished "1 (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. 1. 16-19). A further "untruth of vegetation" is the perpetration of the bough at the left-hand upper corner. This is "a representation of an ornamental group of elephants' tusks, with feathers tied to the end of them. Not the wildest imagination could ever conjure up in it the remotest resemblance to the bough of a tree. It might be the claws of a witch, the talons of an eagle, the horns of a fiend; but it is a full assemblage of every conceivable falsehood which can be told respecting 1 See also the next picture, 98, in which the tree is said by Mr. Ruskin to be "a mere jest " compared to this. foliage, a piece of work so barbarous in every way, that one glance at it ought to prove the complete charlatanism and trickery of the whole system of the old landscape painters" (ibid., § 7). 98. VIEW OF LA RICCIA. Gaspar Poussin (French: 1613-1675). See under 31, p. 359. This picture and the scene of it—the ancient town of Aricia, about fifteen miles from Rome, famous in Roman legend, and Horace's first stopping place on his journey to Brindisi-are described by Mr. Ruskin in an often-quoted passage of Modern Painters: "Whether it can be supposed to resemble the ancient Aricia, now La Riccia, close to Albano, I will not take upon me to determine, seeing that most of the towns of those old masters are quite as much like one place as another; but, at any rate, it is a town on a hill, wooded with two-and-thirty bushes, of very uniform size, and possessing about the same number of leaves each. These bushes are all painted in with one dull opaque brown, becoming very slightly greenish towards the lights, and discover in one place a bit of rock, which of course would in nature have been cool and gray beside the lustrous hues of foliage, and which, therefore, being moreover completely in shade, is consistently and scientifically painted of a very clear, pretty, and positive brick red, the only thing like colour in the picture. The foreground is a piece of road which, in order to make allowance for its greater nearness, for its being completely in light, and, it may be presumed, for the quantity of vegetation usually present on carriage-roads, is given in a very cool green gray; and the truth of the picture is completed by a number of dots in the sky on the right, with a stalk to them, of a sober and similar brown,1 "Not long ago, I was slowly descending this very bit of carriage road. The noon-day sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and their masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it colour, it was conflagration. Purple, 1 It should be noted that this, as well as very many other pictures, has of late years been cleaned. Thus 98 and 68 (in 1880), 36 and 40 (in 1868), have been "cleaned and varnished." 31 was "relined, repaired, and varnished" in 1878; 161 was "cleaned and repaired" in 1868. and crimson and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the gray walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheetlightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless masses of dark rock-dark though flushed with scarlet lichen, casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound; and over all, the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the sea. Tell me who is likest this, Poussin or Turner?" (vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 1-3). Mr. Ruskin further instances the picture as an example of "untruth of trees." It is an elementary law of tree structure that stems only taper when sending off foliage and sprays. "Therefore we see at once that the stem of Gaspar Poussin's tall tree, on the right of the 'La Riccia,' is a painting of a carrot or a parsnip, not of the trunk of a tree. For, being so near that every individual leaf is visible, we should not have seen, in nature, one branch or stem actually tapering. We should have received an impression of graceful diminution; but we should have been able, on examination, to trace it joint by joint, fork by fork, into the thousand minor supports of the leaves. Gaspar Poussin's stem, on the contrary, only sends off four or five minor branches altogether, and both it and they taper violently, and without showing why or wherefore; without parting with a single twig, without showing one vestige of roughness or excrescence; and leaving, therefore, their unfortunate leaves to hold on as best they may. The latter, however, are clever leaves, and support themselves as swarming bees do, hanging on by each other” (ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. i. § 6; and cf. vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 18). 1190. A BOY'S PORTRAIT. Ascribed to François Clouet (French: about 1510-1574). This picture was presented to the Gallery by Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., and it is interesting to note the sage-green background which Mr. Watts has sometimes employed in his own portraits. 1154. GIRL WITH A LAMB. See under 206, p. 361. Be always like the lamb, so mild— Old Nursery Song. An unfinished study-characteristic of the touch of affectation often visible in Greuze's pictures of simplicity. Children fondling pet lambs are a favourite motive in art, but its treatment is seldom free from affectation. Murillo's St. John, XV. 176, p. 380, and compare the fine lady See, for instance, with her lamb in X. 1011, p. 256. 6. DAVID AT THE CAVE OF ADULLAM.1 See under 1018, p. 348. David, in front of the cave, "longed and said, 'Oh that one would give me to drink of the water of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!' And the three mighty men brake through the host of the Philistines (seen in the valley), and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the gate, and took it, and brought it to David" (2 Samuel xxiii. 15, 16). With regard to the landscape, the picture is a good instance at once of Claude's strength and weakness. Thus "the central group of trees is a very noble piece of painting" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iv. ch. ii. § 8). On the other hand the rocks, both in the left corner and in the right, are highly absurd. Claudesque landscape is not, as so commonly supposed, an "The idealised abstract of the nature about Rome. condition of the Florentine conventional landscape, more or It is an ultimate less softened by reference to nature" xviii. § 27). So, too, "the brown foreground and rocks are as (ibid., vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. 1 Called also" Sinon before Priam" (Æneid, ii. 79). false as colour can be: first, because there never was such a brown sunlight, for even the sand and cinders (volcanic tufa) about Naples, granting that he had studied from these ugliest of all formations, are, where they are fresh fractured, golden and lustrous in full light, compared to these ideals of crags, and become, like all other rocks, quiet and gray when weathered; and secondly, because no rock that ever nature stained is without its countless breaking tints of varied vegetation" (ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 16). 161. AN ITALIAN LANDSCAPE. Gaspar Poussin (French: 1613-1675). See under 31, p. 359. A recollection probably of the mountain scenery in North Italy-possibly near Bergamo. The spray of foliage prominent on the left is very characteristic of Gaspar. "One of the most remarkable characters of natural leafage is the constancy with which, while the leaves are arranged on the spray with exquisite regularity, that regularity is modified in their actual effect. For as in every group of leaves some are seen sideways, forming merely long lines, some foreshortened, some crossing each other, every one differently turned and placed from all the others, the forms of the leaves, though in themselves similar, give rise to a thousand strange and differing forms in the group. . . . Now go to Gaspar Poussin and take one of his sprays, where they come against the sky; you may count it all round: one, two, three, four, one bunch; five, six, seven, eight, two bunches; nine, ten, eleven, twelve, three bunches; with four leaves each; and such leaves! every one precisely the same as its neighbour, blunt and round at the end (where every forest leaf is sharp, except that of the fig-tree), tied together by the stalks, and so fastened on to the demoniacal claws above described (see under 68, p. 365), one bunch to each claw" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. i. §§ 16, 17). 1159. THE CALLING OF ABRAHAM. Gaspar Poussin (French: 1613-1675). See under 31, p. 359 A very impressive picture in spite of the somewhat grotesque angel who accosts Abraham and points him to the Almighty seated in the clouds above (Genesis xii.) And indeed it is in his skies that Gaspar points us to the Infinite-in the open sky, stretching far away into that yellow horizon. To what does this strange distant space owe its attractive power? |