as no
surface, and through which we can plunge far and farther, and without
stay or end, into the profundity of space;--whereas, with all the old
landscape painters, except Claude, you may indeed go a long way before
you come to the sky, but you will strike hard against it at last. A
perfectly genuine and untouched sky of Claude is indeed most perfect,
and beyond praise, in all qualities of air; though even with him, I
often feel rather that there is a great deal of pleasant air between me
and the firmament, than that the firmament itself is only air. I do not
mean, however, to say a word against such skies as that of the Enchanted
Castle, or that marked 30 in the National Gallery, or one or two which I
remember at Rome; but how little and by how few these fine passages of
Claude are appreciated, is sufficiently proved by the sufferance of such
villainous and unpalliated copies as we meet with all over Europe, like
the Marriage of Isaac, in our own Gallery, to remain under his name. In
fact, I do not remember above ten pictures of Claude's, in which the
skies, whether repainted or altogether copies, or perhaps from Claude's
hand, but carelessly laid in, like that marked 241, Dulwich Gallery,
were not fully as feelingless and false as those of other masters;
while, with the Poussins, there are no favorable exceptions. Their skies
are systematically wrong; take, for instance, the sky of the Sacrifice
of Isaac. It is here high noon, as is shown by the shadow of the
figures; and what sort of color is the sky at the top of the picture? Is
it pale and gray with heat, full of sunshine, and unfathomable in depth?
On the contrary, it is of a pitch of darkness which, except on the Mont
Blanc or Chimborazo, is as purely impossible as color can be. He might
as well have painted it coal black; and it is laid on with a dead coat
of flat paint, having no one quality or resemblance of sky about it. It
cannot have altered, because the land horizon is as delicate and tender
in tone as possible, and is evidently unchanged; and to complete the
absurdity of the whole thing, this color holds its own, without
graduation or alteration, to within three or four degrees of the
horizon, where it suddenly becomes bold and unmixed yellow. Now the
horizon at noon may be yellow when the whole sky is covered with dark
clouds, and only _one_ open streak of light left in the distance from
which the whole light proceeds; but with a clear, open sky, and oppo