andscape-painters in
this respect. It is one which the reader can perfectly well work out for
himself, by the slightest systematic attention,--one which he will find
existing, not merely between this work and that, but throughout the whole
body of their productions, and down to every leaf and line. And a little
careful watching of nature, especially in her foliage and foregrounds,
and comparison of her with Claude, Gaspar Poussin, and Salvator, will
soon show him that those artists worked entirely on conventional
principles, not representing what they saw, but what they thought would
make a handsome picture; and even when they went to nature, which I
believe to have been a very much rarer practice with them than their
biographers would have us suppose, they copied her like children, drawing
what they knew to be there, but not what they saw there.[22] I believe
you may search the foregrounds of Claude, from one end of Europe to
another, and you will not find the shadow of one leaf cast upon another.
You will find leaf after leaf painted more or less boldly or brightly out
of the black ground, and you will find dark leaves defined in perfect
form upon the light; but you will not find the form of a single leaf
disguised or interrupted by the shadow of another. And Poussin and
Salvator are still farther from anything like genuine truth. There is
nothing in their pictures which might not be manufactured in their
painting-room, with a branch or two of brambles and a bunch or two of
weeds before them, to give them the form of the leaves. And it is
refreshing to turn from their ignorant and impotent repetitions of
childish conception, to the clear, close, genuine studies of modern
artists; for it is not Turner only, (though here, as in all other points,
the first,) who is remarkable for fine and expressive decision of
chiaroscuro. Some passages by J. D. Harding are thoroughly admirable in
this respect, though this master is getting a little too much into a
habit of general keen execution, which prevents the parts which ought to
be especially decisive from being felt as such, and which makes his
pictures, especially the large ones, look a little thin. But some of his
later passages of rock foreground have, taken in the abstract, been
beyond all praise, owing to the exquisite forms and firm expressiveness
of their shadows. And the chiaroscuro of Stanfield is equally deserving
of the most attentive study.

Sec. 8. Second great p