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Gentleman's Magazine 1843 part 2 p.465
but you will not destroy its angles. And if you watch a tree
in the wildest storm, you will find that, though all its
boughs are bending, none lose their character, but the
utmost shoots and sapling spray. Hence Gaspar Poussin, by
his bad drawing, does not make his storm strong but his tree
weak; he does not make his gust violent, but his boughs of
India-rubber," &c.
After comparing the superior truth of Turner is his
delineation of trees, and that of other modern artists, as
Harding and Creswick, and showing how amid intricacy they
have marked and preserved nature's unity and harmony of
shade, the perfect repose and quiet resulting from the
whole, he goes on to say,
"Now it is here that Hobbima and Both fail. They can paint
oak leafage faithfully, but do not know where to stop, and
by doing too much lose the truth of all, - lose the very
truth of detail at which they aim, for all their minute work
only gives two leaves to nature's twenty. They are evidently
incapable of even thinking of a tree, much more of drawing
it, except leaf by leaf; they have no notion or sense of
simplicity, mass, or obscurity, and when they come to
distance, where it is totally impossible that leaves should
be separately seen, yet being incapable of conceiving or
rendering the grand and quiet forms of truth, they are
reduced to paint their bushes with dots and touches
expressive of leaves three feet broad each. Nevertheless
there is a genuine aim in their works, and their failure is
rather to be attributed to ignorance of art, than to such
want of sense for nature as we find in Claude* or
Poussin; and when they come close home, we sometimes receive
from them fine passages of mechanical truth," &c.
In one of his concluding chapters the author concentrates
his remarks on the truth of his favourite artist Turner,
whose works he has delighted to illustrate, and to whose
genius he has laboured to raise a monument of glory,
composed of the ruins of his predecessors, and of those
false shrines which he considers to have been so unworthily
frequented by worshippers.
"The difference in the accuracy of the lines of the
Torso in the Vatican, (the Maestro of M. Angelo,)
from those in one of M. Angelo's finest works, could perhaps
scarcely be appreciated by any eye or feeling undisciplined
by the most perfect and practical anotomical knowledge. It
rests on points of such traceless and refined delicacy,
that, though we feel them in the result, we cannot follow
them in the details. Yet they are such and so great as to
place the Torso alone in art, solitary and supreme,
while the finest of M. Angelo's works, considered with
respect to truth alone, are said to be only on a level with
antiques of the second class, under vthe Apollo and the
Venus, that is, two classes or grades below the
Torso. But suppose the best sculptor in the world,
possessing the most entire appreciation of the excellence of
the Torso, were to sit down pen in hand, to try and tell us
wherein the peculiar truth of each line consisted? could any
words that he could use make us feel the hairs-breadth of
depth and distance on which all depends? or end in anything
more than bare assertions of the inferiority of this line to
that, which, if we did not perceive for ourselves, no
explanation could ever illustarte to us? He might as well
endeavour to explain to us by words some taste or other
subject of sense of which we had no experience. And so it is
of all truths of the highest order; they are separated from
those of average precision by points of extreme delicacy,
which none but the cultivated eye can in the least feel, and
to express which all words are absolutely meaningless and
useless. Consequently, in all that I have been saying of the
truth of artists, I have been able to point out only coarse,
broad, and explicable matters: I have been perfectly unable
to express (and indeed I have made no endeavour to express)
the finely-drawn and distinguished truth in which all the
real excellence of art consists. All those truths which I
have been able to explain and demonstrate in Turner are such
as any artist of ordiinary powers of observation
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