a gray in
it which distinguishes it from the rose color of the leaf of a flower;
and the mingling of this gray of distance, without in the slightest
degree taking away the expression of the intense and perfect purity of
the color in and by itself, is perhaps the last attainment of the great
landscape colorist. In the same way the blue of distance, however
intense, is not the blue of a bright blue flower, and it is not
distinguished from it by different texture merely, but by a certain
intermixture and under current of warm color, which is altogether
wanting in many of the blues of Fielding's distances; and so of every
bright distant color; while in foreground where colors may be, and ought
to be, pure, yet that any of them are expressive of light is only to be
felt where there is the accurate fitting of them to their relative
shadows which we find in the works of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret,
Veronese, Turner, and all other great colorists in proportion as they
are so. Of this fitting of light to shadow Fielding is altogether
regardless, so that his foregrounds are constantly assuming the aspect
of overcharged local color instead of sunshine, and his figures and
cattle look transparent.

Sec. 22. Beauty of mountain foreground.

Again, the finishing of Fielding's foregrounds, as regards their
drawing, is minute without accuracy, multitudinous without thought, and
confused without mystery. Where execution is seen to be in measure
accidental, as in Cox, it may be received as representative of what is
accidental in nature; but there is no part of Fielding's foreground that
is accidental; it is evidently worked and reworked, dotted, rubbed, and
finished with great labor, and where the virtue, playfulness, and
freedom of accident are thus removed, one of two virtues must be
substituted for them. Either we must have the deeply studied and
imaginative foreground, of which every part is necessary to every other,
and whose every spark of light is essential to the well-being of the
whole, of which the foregrounds of Turner in the Liber Studiorum are the
most eminent examples I know, or else we must have in some measure the
botanical faithfulness and realization of the early masters. Neither of
these virtues is to be found in Fielding's. Its features, though grouped
with feeling, are yet scattered and inessential. Any one of them might
be altered in many ways without doing harm; there is no proportioned,
necessary, unalterable r