d
from the legend on the drawing above described, "Passage of Mont Cenis,
January 15th, 1820," that drawing represents what happened on the day in
question to the painter himself. He passed the Alps then in the winter
of 1820; and either in the previous or subsequent summer, but on the
same journey, he made a series of sketches on the Rhine, in body color,
now in Mr. Fawkes's collection. Every one of those sketches is the
almost instantaneous record of an _effect_ of color or atmosphere, taken
strictly from nature, the drawing and the details of every subject being
comparatively subordinate, and the color nearly as principal as the
light and shade had been before,--certainly the leading feature, though
the light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. And
naturally, as the color becomes the leading object, those times of day
are chosen in which it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least five
out of six of Turner's drawings represented ordinary daylight, we now
find his attention directed constantly to the evening: and, for the
first time, we have those rosy lights upon the hills, those gorgeous
falls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with the
blue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever since
been the themes of his mightiest thoughts.

I have no doubt, that the _immediate_ reason of this change was the
impression made upon him by the colors of the continental skies. When
he first travelled on the Continent (1800), he was comparatively a young
student; not yet able to draw form as he wanted, he was forced to give
all his thoughts and strength to this primary object. But now he was
free to receive other impressions; the time was come for perfecting his
art, and the first sunset which he saw on the Rhine taught him that all
previous landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison with
natural color, the things that had been called paintings were mere ink
and charcoal, and that all precedent and all authority must be cast away
at once, and trodden under foot. He cast them away: the memories of
Vandevelde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great mind they had
encumbered; they and all the rubbish of the schools together with them;
the waves of the Rhine swept them away for ever; and a new dawn rose
over the rocks of the Siebengebirge.

There was another motive at work, which rendered the change still more
complete. His fellow artists were already consc