res of the life size, and the
leaves with Tintoret may articulate on a canvas of sixty feet by
twenty-five, must be generalized by Turner on one of four by three.
Another circumstance of some importance is the assumed distance of
the foreground; many landscape painters seem to think their nearest
foreground is always equally near, whereas its distance from the
spectator varies not a little, being always at least its own
calculable breadth from side to side as estimated by figures or any
other object of known size at the nearest part of it. With Claude
almost always; with Turner often, as in the Daphne and Leucippus,
this breadth is forty or fifty yards; and as the nearest foreground
object _must_ then be at least that distance removed, and _may_ be
much more, it is evident that no completion of close detail is in
such cases allowable, (see here another proof of Claude's erroneous
practice;) with Titian and Tintoret, on the contrary, the foreground
is rarely more than five or six yards broad, and its objects
therefore being only five or six yards distant are entirely
detailed.

None of these circumstances, however, in any wise affect the great
principle, the confusion of detail taking place sooner or later in
all cases. I ought to have noted, however, that many of the pictures
of Turner in which the confused drawing has been least understood,
have been luminous _twilights_; and that the uncertainty of twilight
is therefore added to that of general distance. In the evenings of
the south it not unfrequently happens that objects touched with the
reflected light of the western sky, continue even for the space of
half an hour after sunset, glowing, ruddy, and intense in color, and
almost as bright as if they were still beneath actual sunshine, even
till the moon begins to cast a shadow: but in spite of this
brilliancy of color all the details become ghostly and ill-defined.
This is a favorite moment of Turner's, and he invariably
characterizes it, not by gloom, but by uncertainty of detail. I have
never seen the effect of clear twilight thoroughly rendered by art;
that effect in which all details are lost, while intense clearness
and light are still felt in the atmosphere, in which nothing is
distinctly seen, and yet it is not darkness, far less mist, that is
the cause of concealment.