Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 55

Gaspard Poussin (French: 1613-1675). See 31.

The one gleam of light breaking through the clouds falls on the watch tower of a castle, perched on a rock – "a stately image of stability," where all things else are bent beneath the power of the storm. The spirit of the picture is, however, better than its execution. Take, for instance, the clouds. They are mere "massive concretions of ink and indigo, wrung and twisted very hard, apparently in a vain effort to get some moisture out of them" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. iv. § 6). In the tree forms, again, Ruskin sees a concentration of errors. "Gaspard Poussin, by his bad drawing, does not make his stem strong, but his tree weak; he does not make his gust violent, but his boughs of Indian-rubber" (for details of this criticism see ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. i. §§ 12, 13).