al assertion of form, which
the eye feels indeed to be close home to it, and yet cannot rest upon,
or cling to, nor entirely understand, and from which it is driven away
of necessity, to those parts of distance on which it is intended to
repose. And this principle, originated by Turner, though fully carried
out by him only, has yet been acted on with judgment and success by
several less powerful artists of the English school. Some six years ago,
the brown moorland foregrounds of Copley Fielding were very instructive
in this respect. Not a line in them was made out, not a single object
clearly distinguishable. Wet broad sweeps of the brush, sparkling,
careless, and accidental as nature herself, always truthful as far as
they went, implying knowledge, though not expressing it, suggested
everything, while they represented nothing. But far off into the
mountain distance came the sharp edge and the delicate form; the whole
intention and execution of the picture being guided and exerted where
the great impression of space and size was to be given. The spectator
was compelled to go forward into the waste of hills--there, where the
sun broke wide upon the moor, he must walk and wander--he could not
stumble and hesitate over the near rocks, nor stop to botanize on the
first inches of his path.[25] And the impression of these pictures was
always great and enduring, as it was simple and truthful. I do not know
anything in art which has expressed more completely the force and
feeling of nature in these particular scenes. And it is a farther
illustration[26] of the principle we are insisting upon, that where, as
in some of his later works, he has bestowed more labor on the
foreground, the picture has lost both in space and sublimity. And among
artists in general, who are either not aware of the principle, or fear
to act upon it, (for it requires no small courage, as well as skill, to
treat a foreground with that indistinctness and mystery which they have
been accustomed to consider as characteristic of distance,) the
foreground is not only felt, as every landscape painter will confess, to
be the most embarrassing and unmanageable part of the picture, but, in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, will go near to destroy the effect
of the rest of the composition. Thus Callcott's Trent is severely
injured by the harsh group of foreground figures; and Stanfield very
rarely gets through an Academy picture without destroying much of its
spac