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To the Editor of “The Weekly Chronicle.”

Sir: I was much gratified by reading in your columns of the 15th4 instant a piece of close, candid, and artistical criticism on my work entitled “Modern Painters.” Serious and well-based criticism is at the present day so rare, and our periodicals are filled so universally with the splenetic jargon or meaningless praise of ignorance, that it is no small pleasure to an author to meet either with praise which he can view with patience, or censure which he can regard with respect. I seldom, therefore, read, and have never for an instant thought of noticing, the ordinary animadversions of the press; but the critique on “Modern Painters” in your pages is evidently the work of a man both of knowledge and feeling; and is at once so candid and so keen, so honest and so subtle, that I am desirous of offering a few remarks on the points on which it principally touches—they are of importance to art; and I feel convinced that the writer is desirous only of elucidating truth, not of upholding a favorite error. With respect first to Gaspar’s painting of the “Sacrifice of Isaac.” It is not on the faith of any single shadow that I have pronounced the time intended to be near noon5—though the shadow of the two figures being very short, and cast from the spectator, is in itself conclusive. The whole system of chiaroscuro of the picture is lateral; and the light is expressly shown not to come from the distance by its breaking brightly on the bit of rock and waterfall on the left, from which the high copse wood altogether intercepts the rays proceeding from the horizon. There are multitudes of pictures by Gaspar with this same effect—leaving no doubt whatever on my mind that they are all manufactured by the same approved recipe, probably given him by Nicholas, but worked out by Gaspar with the clumsiness and vulgarity which are invariably attendant on the efforts of an inferior mind to realize the ideas of a greater. The Italian masters universally make the horizon the chief light of their picture, whether the effect intended be of noon or evening. Gaspar, to save himself the trouble of graduation, washes his sky half blue and half yellow, and separates the two colors by a line of cloud. In order to get his light conspicuous and clear, he washes the rest of his sky of a dark deep blue, without any thoughts about time of day or elevation of sun, or any such minutiæ; finally, having frequently found the convenience of a black foreground, with a bit of light coming in round the corner, and probably having no conception of the possibility of painting a foreground on any other principle, he naturally falls into the usual method—blackens it all over, touches in a few rays of lateral light, and turns out a very respectable article; for in such language only should we express the completion of a picture painted throughout on conventional principles, without one reference to nature, and without one idea of the painter’s own. With respect to Salvator’s “Mercury and the Woodman,”6 your critic has not allowed for the effect of time on its blues. They are now, indeed, sobered and brought down, as is every other color in the picture, until it is scarcely possible to distinguish any of the details in its darker parts; but they have been pure and clean, and the mountain is absolutely the same color as the open part of the sky. When I say it is “in full light,” I do not mean that it is the highest light of the picture (for no distant mountain can be so, when compared with bright earth or white clouds), but that no accidental shadow is cast upon it; that it is under open sky, and so illumined that there must necessarily be a difference in hue between its light and dark sides, at which Salvator has not even hinted.

Again, with respect to the question of focal distances,7 your critic, in common with many very clever people to whom I have spoken on the subject, has confused the obscurity of objects which are laterally out of the focal range, with that of objects which are directly out of the focal distance. If all objects in a landscape were in the same plane, they should be represented on the plane of the canvas with equal distinctness, because the eye has no greater lateral range on the canvas than in the landscape, and can only command a point in each. But this point in the landscape may present an intersection of lines belonging to different distances—as when a branch of a tree, or tuft of grass, cuts against the horizon: and yet these different distances cannot be discerned together: we lose one if we look at the other, so that no painful intersection of lines is ever felt. But on the canvas, as the lines of foreground and of distance are on the same plane, they will be seen together whenever they intersect, painfully and distinctly; and, therefore, unless we make one series, whether near or distant, obscure and indefinite, we shall always represent as visible at once that which the eye can only perceive by two separate acts of seeing. Hold up your finger before this page, six inches from it. If you look at the edge of your finger, you cannot see the letters; if you look at the letters, you cannot see the edge of your finger, but as a confused, double, misty line. Hence in painting, you must either take for your subject the finger or the letters; you cannot paint both distinctly without violation of truth. It is of no consequence how quick the change of the eye may be; it is not one whit quicker than its change from one part of the horizon to another, nor are the two intersecting distances more visible at the same time than two opposite portions of a landscape to which it passes in succession. Whenever, therefore, in a landscape, we look from the foreground to the distance, the foreground is subjected to two degrees of indistinctness: the first, that of an object laterally out of the focus of the eye; and the second, that of an object directly out of the focus of the eye; being too near to be seen with the focus adapted to the distance. In the picture, when we look from the foreground to the distance, the foreground is subjected only to one degree of indistinctness, that of being out of the lateral range; for as both the painting of the distance and of the foreground are on the same plane, they are seen together with the same focus. Hence we must supply the second degree of indistinctness by slurring with the brush, or we shall have a severe and painful intersection of near and distant lines, impossible in nature. Finally, a very false principle is implied by part of what is advanced by your critic—which has led to infinite error in art, and should therefore be instantly combated whenever it were hinted—that the ideal is different from the true. It is, on the contrary, only the perfection of truth. The Apollo is not a false representation of man, but the most perfect representation of all that is constant and essential in man—free from the accidents and evils which corrupt the truth of his nature.8 Supposing we are describing to a naturalist some animal he does not know, and we tell him we saw one with a hump on its back, and another with strange bends in its legs, and another with a long tail, and another with no tail, he will ask us directly, But what is its true form, what is its real form? This truth, this reality, which he requires of us, is the ideal form, that which is hinted at by all the individuals—aimed at, but not arrived at. But never let it be said that, when a painter is defying the principles of nature at every roll of his brush, as I have shown that Gaspar does, when, instead of working out the essential characters of specific form, and raising those to their highest degree of nobility and beauty, he is casting all character aside, and carrying out imperfection and accident; never let it be said, in excuse for such degradation of nature, that it is done in pursuit of the ideal. As well might this be said in defence of the promising sketch of the human form pasted on the wainscot behind the hope of the family—artist and musician of equal power—in the “Blind Fiddler.”9 Ideal beauty is the generalization of consummate knowledge, the concentration of perfect truth—not the abortive vision of ignorance in its study. Nor was there ever yet one conception of the human mind beautiful, but as it was based on truth. Whenever we leave nature, we fall immeasurably beneath her. So, again, I find fault with the “ropy wreath” of Gaspar,10 not because he chose massy cloud instead of light cloud; but because he has drawn his massy cloud falsely, making it look tough and powerless, like a chain of Bologna sausages, instead of gifting it with the frangible and elastic vastness of nature’s mountain vapor.

Finally, Sir, why must it be only “when he is gone from us”11 that the power of our greatest English landscape painter is to be acknowledged? It cannot, indeed, be fully understood until the current of years has swept away the minor lights which stand around it, and left it burning alone; but at least the scoff and the sneer might be lashed into silence, if those only did their duty by whom it is already perceived. And let us not think that our unworthiness has no effect on the work of the master. I could be patient if I thought that no effect was wrought on his noble mind by the cry of the populace; but, scorn it as he may, and does, it is yet impossible for any human mind to hold on its course, with the same energy and life, through the oppression of a perpetual hissing, as when it is cheered on by the quick sympathy of its fellow-men. It is not in art as in matters of political duty, where the path is clear and the end visible. The springs of feeling may be oppressed or sealed by the want of an answer in other bosoms, though the sense of principle cannot be blunted except by the individual’s own error; and though the knowledge of what is right, and the love of what is beautiful, may still support our great painter through the languor of age—and Heaven grant it may for years to come—yet we cannot hope that he will ever cast his spirit upon the canvas with the same freedom and fire as if he felt that the voice of its inspiration was waited for among men, and dwelt upon with devotion. Once, in ruder times, the work of a great painter12 was waited for through days at his door, and attended to its place of deposition by the enthusiasm of a hundred cities; and painting rose from that time, a rainbow upon the Seven Hills, and on the cypressed heights of Fiésole, guiding them and lighting them forever, even in the stillness of their decay. How can we hope that England will ever win for herself such a crown, while the works of her highest intellects are set for the pointing of the finger and the sarcasm of the tongue, and the sole reward for the deep, earnest, holy labor of a devoted life, is the weight of stone upon the trampled grave, where the vain and idle crowd will come to wonder how the brushes are mimicked in the marble above the dust of him who wielded them in vain?

I have the honor to be, Sir,

Your most obedient servant,

The Author of “Modern Painters.”