AN OXFORD GRADUATE ON MODERN AND ANCIENT LANDSCAPE PAINTERS.

Tuts is a remarkable book—a treatise on landscape-painting at once intelligible to the general reader and instructive to the artist, written by one who is thoroughly versed in the theory and practice of picture-making. The Oxford Graduate has travelled through some of the finest scenery in Europe, observing the various aspects of nature with a painter's eye and pencil in hand ; he has studied the pictures of the great masters in all the principal collections abroad and at home ; and his views of the art of landscrie-painting are based on philosophy as well as experimental knowledge. 'tis opinions are original, and startling from their novelty and boldness : they are expressed with distinctness and force, advocated with acute reasoning and great eloquence, and supported by a mass of evidence deduced from close observation of natural phmnomena and the productions of art : and though his zeal runs into enthu- siasm, that frequently carries him beyond the bounds of sober sense and judgment, he is evidently animated by an earnest love of truth.

The main purpose of the book is to vindicate Mr. TURNER, the Royal Academician, against the ridicule and disparagement of incompetent critics, and his supremacy as a landscape- painter over every other artist ancient and modern. In the estimation of the Oxford Graduate, J. M. W. TURNER is " the greatest landscape-painter whom the world has ever seen" —" above all cri- ticism, beyond all animadversion, and beyond all praise." To make out his case completely, and establish his conclusions on a firm basis, the author first lays down the leading principles that govern the art of painting, and investigates the sources of its power and in- fluence over the mind. Rightly regarding painting only as a medium for conveying ideas through the representation of objects, he infers that the greatest painter is he whose pictures embody most ideas of the highest kind in the truest and most impressive manner. He describes the nature and effect of the various ideas received from works of art ; classing them under five heads.

I. Ideas of Power—The perception or conception of the mental or bodily powers by which the work has been produced.

II. Ideas of Imitation—The perception that the thing produced resembles something else.

III. Ideas of Truth—The perception of faithfulness in a statement of facts by the thing produced.

IV. Ideas of Beauty—The perception of beauty either in the thing pro- duced or in what it suggests or resembles.

V. Ideas of Relation—The perception of intellectual relations in the thing produced or in what it suggests or resembles."

Each class of ideas is clearly defined and illustrated ; but Ideas of Truth are treated of at such length that this part of the subject occupies the greater part of the volume, embracing the whole range of the legitimate resources of art and the phmnomena of na- tural appearances. In illustrating the influence exerted on the mind of the beholder by the artist's selection of visible facts and mode of representing them, the author exemplifies the neglect or observance of the principles of art and the laws of nature on the part of different artists ancient and modern, by reference to acces- sible pictures ; testing their comparative merits by the degree of approximation to the truth of nature in these works, and by the fulness and grandeur of the ideas conveyed in them. The result is, that, tried by this standard, almost all the famous landscape-painters of the Italian and Dutch schools—RUBENS and NICHOLAS Pur,s9ist excepted—are convicted of having studied nature imperfectly, and depicted her characteristics falsely and in a conventional manner. "Speaking generally of the Old Masters," says the author, "I re- fer only to Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Cuyp, Berghem, Both, Ruysdael, Hobbima, Teniers, (in his landscapes,) Paul Pot- ter, Canaletti, and the various Van Somethings and Bach Some- things, more especially and malignantly those who have libelled the sea." A pretty comprehensive " only ! " On the other hand, a few living English landscape-painters--including TURNER, STAN.. FIELD, HARDING, FROUT, Cox, and COPLEY FIELDING—are proved to have depicted particular features and aspects of nature with vivid accuracy ; TURNER alone being entirely and invariably true. This is a staggering assertion, calculated to shock connoisseurs accustomed to view with reverential admiration the works of the old painters, and to arouse the blind opposition of all whose prejudices are stronger than their regard for truth. It is not to be wondered, therefore, that the new doctrine preached by the Oxford Graduate with all the fervour and exaltation of a zealot should have been scouted, without due examination, as heresy and delusion, amount- ing almost to an hallucination or Turnermania ; more especially as the critics are one and all treated by the author with supreme con- tempt. At the same time, he lays himself open to some derision by the transcendental tone in which he descants on the perfections of TURNER, and by giving the reins to his fancy in describing the works of the moderns. It were easy, by culling passages that are flighty and extravagant, to throw discredit and ridicule on the author ; but, leaving this, we prefer to inquire dispassionately into the validity of his arguments. The ground of comparison between the works of TURNER and those of the Old Masters is narrowed in this treatise to a single point—the correctness of their representation of nature. TURNER'S pictures having been accused of wanting truth and being unlike nature, his defender has taken his assailants on their own ground; and he unquestionably makes out that TURNER has studied natural phmnotnena more scientifically than the Old Masters, and that he depicts effects such as they never dreamed of representing. But some may contend that the impression produced by the land- scapes of CLAUDE, Cuyr, CANALETTI, and others—however incor- rect in detail and deficient in truth they may be—is neverthe- less more distinct and consonant with the sober brightness and repose of nature, than are the more daring and ambitious effects of light, space, and atmosphere in TURNER'S pictures; where parti- cular truths are apt to be overlooked in the general impression of un- easy exaggeration and unreality, resulting from his heightened colour- ing, defective drawing, and slight and vague indication of forms.

The root of the matter is found in the following DEFINITION OF PAINTING.

Painting, or art generally, as such, with all its technicalities, difficulties. and particular ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing. He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which hie thoughts are to be expressed. He has done just as much towards being that which we ought to respect as a great painter, as a man who has learned how to express himself grammatically and melodiously has towards being a great poet. The language is indeed more difficult of acquirement in the one case than in the other, and possesses more power of delighting the sense while it speaks to the intellect ; but it is, nevertheless, nothing more than language; and all those excellencies which are peculiar to the painter as such, are merely what rhythm, melody, precision, and force, are in the words of the orator and the poet—ne- cessary to their greatness, but not the tests of their greatness. It is not by the mode of representing and saying, but by what is represented and said, that the respective greatness either of the painter or the writer is to be finally determined.

Speaking with strict propriety, therefore, we should call a man a great painter only as he excelled in precision and force in the language of lines, and a great 'versifier as he excelled in precision or force of the language of words. A. great poet would then be a term strictly and in precisely the same sense applicable to both, if warranted by the character of the images or thoughts which each in their respective languages conveyed.

Take, for instance, one of the most perfect poems or pictures (I use the word as synonymous) which modern times have seen—" the Old Shepherd's

Chief Mourner." Here the exquisite execution of the glossy and crisp hair of the dog, the bright, sharp touching of the green bough beside it, the clear painting of the wood of the coffin and the folds of the blanket, are language— language clear and expressive in the highest degree. But the close pressure of the dog's breast against the wood, the convulsive clinging of the paws, which has dragged the blanket off the trestle, the total powerlessness of the head laid close and motionless upon its folds, the fixed and tearful fall of the eye in its utter hopelessness, the rigidity of repose, which marks that there has been no motion nor change in the trance of agony since the last blow was struck on the coffin-lid, the quietness and gloom of the chamber, the spectacles marking the place where the Bible was last closed, indicating how lonely has been the life, how unwatched the departure, of him who is now laid solitary iii his sleep ; these are all thoughts—thoughts by which the picture is separated at once from hundreds of equal merit as far as mere painting goes, by which it ranks as a work of the highest art, and stamps its author, not as the neat imitator of the texture of a skin or the fold of a drapery, but as the man of mind.

It is not, however, always easy, either in painting or literature, to determine where the influence of language stops and where that of thought begins. Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed, that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed. But the highest thoughts are those which are least dependent on language; and the dignity of any composition and praise to which it is entitled are in exact proportion to its independency of language or expression.

This is eloquently expressed and happily illustrated ; though it suggests a qualification of the analogy between language and painting. The influence of the medium is much more strongly felt in pictorial representation than in verbal description, even when it takes the shape of poetry. Painting is an imitative art ; and though imitation is only a means to the end of conveying ideas, and should be limited to a suggestive indication of the external characteristics of objects, yet the pleasure derived from he mere representation of scenes and persons by means of a few touches of black and white or colour, must ever be a principal in- gredient in the enjoyment derived from a picture. Our author, however, repudiates this application of the term "imitation," and employs it to signify that deceptive or illusory imitation of the sub- stance and surface of objects which aims at imposing on the senses, and is a vulgar error in art.

REAL MEANING OF THE TERM "IMITATION."

Whenever anything looks like what it is not, the resemblance being so great as nearly to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable surprise, an agreeable excite- ment of mind, exactly the same in its nature as that which we receive from juggling. Whenever we perceive this in something produced by art—that is to say, whenever the work is seen to resemble something which we know it is not— we receive what I call an idea of imitation. Why such ideas are pleasing, it would be out of our present purpose to inquire ; we only know that there is no man who does not feel pleasure in his animal nature from gentle surprise, and that such surprise can be excited in no more distinct manner than by the evidence that a thing is not what it appears to be. Now, two things are re- quisite to our complete and most pleasurable perception of this: first, that the resemblance be so perfect as to amount to a deception; secondly, that there be some means of proving at the same moment that it is a deception. The most perfect ideas and pleasures of imitation are, therefore, when one sense is con- tradicted by another, both bearing as positive evidence on the subject as each is capable of alone—as when the eye says a thing is round, and the finger says it is flat : they are therefore never felt in so high a degree as in painting, where appearance of projection, roughness, hair, velvet, &e. are given with a smooth Surface, or in wax-work, where the first evidence of the senses is perpetually contradicted by their experience: but the moment we come to marble, our defi- nition checks us, for a marble figure does not look like what it is not—it looks like marble, and like the form of a man ; but then it is marble, and it is the Lorin of a man. It does not look like a man, which it is not, but like the form of a man, which it is. Form is form, bond fide and actual, whether in marble or in flesh—not an imitation or resemblance of form, but real form. The chalk outline of the bough of a tree on paper is not an imitation—it looks like chalk stud paper, not like wood ; and that which it suggests to the mind is not pro- perly said to be like the form of a bough, it is the form of a bough. Now, then, we see the limits of an idea of imitation; it extends only to the sensation of trickery and deception occasioned by a thing being intentionally different from what it seems to be ; and the degree of the pleasure depends on the de- gree of difference and the perfection of the resemblance, not on the nature of the thing resembled. The simple pleasure in the imitation is precisely of the lame degree, (if the accuracy be equal,) whether the subject be a Madonna or a lemon-peel.

Regarded in this sense, "imitation" is at variance with the true principles of art : it falsifies every picture where it is intro- duced; for as none but gross, paltry, and inanimate objects can be imitated to deception, nobler and living things seen in juxtaposi- tion must appear proportionably less real in seeming than these vulgar accessories. If the buttons on a coat seem palpable to the touch, the head of the wearer appears less like flesh and blood ; if the eyebrow be depicted with deceptive minuteness, the eye be-

neat') looks fixed and glassy—the closeness of the imitation of' the brow producing a rigidity that precludes all idea of animation and movement. DENNER depicted the reflections on the pupil of the eye and mapped the wrinkles of the face; and the result is, that his heads are less lifelike than those of any other painter. A tear imitated to delusion on the cheek of a Magdalen turns the flesh to marble or ivory. What the Oxford Graduate terms " imitation" we should call deception. But while denouncing imitation as false and contemptible, he insists strongly upon scientific accuracy in depicting the characteristics of natural objects and effects; and en- forces the necessity of significant and finished execution in paint- ing. It is for these qualities that he prefers contemporary painters of landscape to the Old Masters; who are charged, we think unjustly, with aiming only at illusory imitation. He thus characterizes the CHIEF AIM OF THE OLD LANDSCAPE-PAINTERS.

The deception of the senses was the great and first end of all their art. To attain this, they paid deep and serious attention to effects of light and tone, and to the exact degree of relief which material objects take against light and at- mosphere ; and, sacrificing every other truth to these, not necessarily, but be- cause they required no others for deception, they succeeded in rendering these particular facts with a fidelity and force which, in the pictures that have come down to us utiinjured, are as yet unequalled, and never can be surpassed. They painted their foregrounds with laborious industry, covering them with details so as to render them deceptive to the ordinary eye, regardless of beauty or truth in the details themselves ; they painted their trees with careful attention to their pitch of shade against the sky, utterly regardless of all that is beautiful or essential in the anatomy of their foliage and boughs : they painted their dis-

tances with exquisite use of transparent colour and aerial tone, totally neglect-

ful of all facts and forms which nature uses such colour and tone to relieve and adorn. They had neither love of Nature nor feeling of her beauty : they looked for her coldest and most commonplace effects, because they were easiest to imitate, and for her most vulgar forms, because they were most easily to be re- cognized by the untaught eyes of those whom alone they could hope to please; they did it, like the Pharisee of old, to be seen of men, and they bad their re- ward. They do deceive and delight the unpractised eye ; they will to all ages, as lung as their colours endure, be the staudards of excellence with all, who, ignorant of nature, claim to be thought learned in art ; and they will to all ages he, to those who have thorough love and knowledge of the creation which they libel, instructive proofs of the limited number and low character of the truths which are necessary, and the accumulated multitude of pure, broad, bold falsehoods, which are admissible in pictures meant only to deceive.

This is exaggeration almost to untruth; and it may serve to

exemplify how the writer vitiates his conclusions by pushing his in- ferences too far. What proof can he have that the old painters " had neither love of Nature nor feeling for her beauty," and that they "sought only to deceive "? It does not inevitably follow from the circumstance of their having studied Nature superficially and represented her conventionally. We agree with him in attributing their deficiencies to the limitation of their aim to the representation of the relief of trees, hills, and buildings, against the sky ; but we also ascribe this limitation to their applying the same practice of painting that they employed in depicting a few objects the size of life seen close to the eye to the representation of the multitude of objects on a small scale in a landscape, the nearest of which are removed from the eye. This would account for the in-door scenes of TENIERS being excepted from the censure passed on his landscapes.

Landscape-painting is, comparatively speaking, a new art ;

and RUBENS seems to have been the first painter who had a right perception of the way in which scenery ought to be repre- sented. The English school of water-colour painting, however, has done the most towards showing how atmospheric effects are best rendered in a picture ; the transparent medium and white paper ground being peculiarly favourable to luminous freshness and aerial tone. TURNER was raised in this school, under MALTON, a master of perspective, with EDRIDGE and GIRT1N for his contemporaries; and the fruit of his early studies is visible in his thorough knowledge of linear and aerial perspective, light and shade, and his correct and elegant drawing (when he chooses) of architecture, trees, ships—of everything, in short, but the human figure, which he is very imperfectly acquainted with. No artist understands or paints the elements like TURNER: his clouds and skies, air and seas, sunlight and moonlight, transcend in truth and variety of effects those of every other painter : there is no one to compare with him in the representation of space filled with light and atmosphere. In all that his eulogist says of TURNER in these particulars we concur, with only a reservation upon certain minutise—such, for instance, as the recognition in his pictures of the precise time of day! It is unfortunate that the most exquisite and numerous of TURNER'S works, his water-colour drawings, are unknown to the public—thanks to the Royal Academy, which pro- vides no fitting place for exhibiting this class of pictures. Then, his oil-paintings are rarely seen from the right point of view, or looked at with sufficient attention : people go close up to a picture that can only be properly viewed from a distance of thrice its length, and see nothing but smears and streaks of paint ; and come away wondering that anybody can admire such things,—as well they may, for they have not seen the picture. As regards colour- ing, his defender truly says that TURNER is very sparing of pure colour; the dazzling brilliancy of his effects arising not from in- tense hues but from the extension of the chromatic scale of his palette by an infinity of delicate modulations in the harmony of tints, and the luminousness of his tone. It is the indefiniteness of his forms and the bad drawing of his figures that most provoke ridicule; for people not being able to make out the meaning of the picture, are apt to regard it as only some smudges of gay colour harmoniously blended. This defect in TURNER'S pictures is thus ingeniously palliated by his defender, in explaining the

RATIONALE OF SPACE IN THE LANDSCAPES OF RDBENS AND TURNER.

If in a painting our foreground is anything, our distance must be nothing, and vice verse : for if we represent our near and distant objects as giving both at once that distinct image to the eye which we receive in nature from each when we look at them separately, and if we distinguish them from each other only by the air-tone and indistinctness dependant on positive distance, we violate one of the most essential principles of nature—we represent that as seen at once which can only be seen by two separate acts of seeing, and tell a false- hood as gross as if we had represented four sides of a cubic object visible together. Now, to this fact and principle, no landscape-painter of the old school, as far as I remember, ever paid the slightest attention. Finishing their foregrounds clearly and sharply, and with vigorous impression on the eye—giving even the leaves of their bushes and grass with perfect edge and shape—they proceeded into the distance with equal attention to what they could see of its details; they gave all that the eye can perceive in a distance, when it is fully and en- tirely devoted to it : and therefore, though masters of aerial tone, though em- ploying every expedient that art could supply to conceal the intersection of lines, though caricaturing the force and shadow of near objects to throw them close upon the eye, they never succeeded in truly representing space. * ' • But only Rubens affords us instances of anything like complete observation of the principle in entire landscape. The distance of his picture of his own villa, in the National Gallery, is no small nor unimportant part of the composition ; the chief light and colour of the picture are dedicated to it. But Rubens felt that, after giving the very botany and ornithology of his foreground, he could not maintain equal decision, nor truthfully give one determined outline in the distance. Nor is there one ; all is indistinct, and confused, and mingling, though everything, and an infinity of things too, is told : and if any person will take the trouble to keep his eye on this distance for ten minutes, and then turn to any other landscape in the room, he will feel them flat, crude, cutting, and destitute of space and light. Titian, Claude, or Poussin, it matters not, however scientifically opposed in colour, however exquisitely mellowed and re- moved in tone, however vigorously relieved with violent shade, all will look flat Canvass beside this truthful, melting, abundant, limitless distance of Rubens. But it was reserved for modern art to take even a bolder step in the pursuit of truth. To sink the distance for the foreground was comparatively easy ; but it implied the partial destruction of exactly that part of the landscape which is most interesting, most dignified, and most varied—of all, in fact, except the mere leafage and atone under the spectator's feet. Turner introduced a new era in landscape art, by showing that the foreground might be sunk for the distance, and that it was possible to express immediate proximity to the spec- tator without giving anything like completeness to the forms of the near ob- jects. This is not done by slurred or soft lines, observe, (always the sign of vice in art,) but by a decisive imperfection—a firm but partial assertion of form, which the eye feels indeed to be close home to it, and yet cannot rest upon, nor 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.

This volume, though complete in itself so far as it goes, is only the introductory portion of a work on art which its author is en- gaged upon, and the completion of which depended upon the re- ception given to the first. This, we understand, has been such as to encourage him to proceed with his undertaking : the call for a second edition within a year of the publication of the first is evi- dence of the interest it has excited. The benefit that it will impart to the popular taste at this juncture is very great ; not merely in opening the public eyes to the merits of TURNER'S pictures, but in checking a tendency to rigidity and gross materialism in painting, and exalting the spiritual influence of art above its sensual attrac- tions. Our space, already too largely trespassed upon by a techni- cal subject treated controversially, is inadequate to the discussion of several points that we would fain have considered ; and we must be content with recommending this able and excellent treatise on landscape-painting to all, whether artists or amateurs, who desire to have their perceptions of the beauties of nature and their judgment of pictures enlightened, by the observation and reasoning of a writer possessing exact and extensive knowledge of his subject, with re- fined taste and elevated views.