an instance of anything near enough to have details visible,
painted in sky blue. Wherever Turner gives blue, there he gives
atmosphere; it is air, not object. Blue he gives to his sea; so does
nature;--blue he gives, sapphire-deep, to his extreme distance; so does
nature;--blue he gives to the misty shadows and hollows of his hills; so
does nature: but blue he gives _not_, where detail and illumined surface
are visible; as he comes into light and character, so he breaks into
warmth and varied hue; nor is there in one of his works, and I speak of
the Academy pictures especially, one touch of cold color which is not to
be accounted for, and proved right and full of meaning.

I do not say that Salvator's distance is not artist-like; both in that,
and in the yet more glaringly false distances of Titian above alluded
to, and in hundreds of others of equal boldness of exaggeration, I can
take delight, and perhaps should be sorry to see them other than they
are; but it is somewhat singular to hear people talking of Turner's
exquisite care and watchfulness in color as false, while they receive
such cases of preposterous and audacious fiction with the most generous
and simple credulity.

Sec. 5. Poussin, and Claude.

Again, in the upper sky of the picture of Nicolas Poussin, before
noticed, the clouds are of a very fine clear olive-green, about the same
tint as the brightest parts of the trees beneath them. They cannot have
altered, (or else the trees must have been painted in gray,) for the hue
is harmonious and well united with the rest of the picture, and the blue
and white in the centre of the sky are still fresh and pure. Now a green
sky in open and illumined distance is very frequent, and very beautiful;
but rich olive-green clouds, as far as I am acquainted with nature, are
a piece of color in which she is not apt to indulge. You will be
puzzled to show me such a thing in the recent works of Turner.[20]
Again, take any important group of trees, I do not care whose--Claude's,
Salvator's, or Poussin's--with lateral light (that in the Marriage of
Isaac and Rebecca, or Gaspar's sacrifice of Isaac, for instance:) Can it
be seriously supposed that those murky browns and melancholy greens are
representative of the tints of leaves under full noonday sun? I know
that you cannot help looking upon all these pictures as pieces of dark
relief against a light wholly proceeding from the distances; but they
are nothing of the kind-