EFFECTS OF FAULTY VISION IN PAINTING. 175 



having admired his earlier works, I entered another room which con- 

 tained his later paintings! Are these really by the same hand? I 

 asked myself on first inspecting them ; or have they suffered in any 

 way? On examining them, however, more closely, a question pre- 

 sented itself to my mind which was to me a subject of interesting 

 diagnosis. "Was the great change, which made the painter of " Cross- 

 ing the Brook " afterward produce such pictures as " Shade and Dark- 

 ness," caused by an ocular or cerebral disturbance ? Researches into 

 the life of Turner could not afford an answer to this question. All 

 that I could learn was, that during the last five years of his life his 

 power of vision as well as his intellect had suffered. In no way, how- 

 ever, did this account for the changes which began to manifest them- 

 selves about fifteen years before that time. The question could there- 

 fore only be answered by a direct study of his pictures from a purely 

 scientific, and not at all from an aesthetic or artistic point of view. 



I chose for this purpose pictures belonging to the middle of the 

 period which I consider pathological, i. e., not quite healthy, and 

 analyzed them in all their details, with regard to color, drawing, and 

 distribution of lio;ht and shade. 



It was particularly important to ascertain if the anomaly of the 

 whole picture could be deduced from a regularly-recurring fault in its 

 details. This fault is a vertical streakiness, which is caused by every 

 illuminated point having been changed into a vertical line. The elon- 

 gation is, generally speaking, in exact proportion to the brightness of 

 the light ; that is to say, the more intense the light which diffuses 

 itself from the illuminated point in Nature, the longer becomes the line 

 which represents it on the picture. Thus, for instance, there proceeds 

 from the sun in the centre of a picture a vertical yellow streak, divid- 

 ing it into two entirely distinct halves, which are not connected by 

 any horizontal line. In Turner's earlier pictures, the disk of the sun is 

 clearly defined, the light equally radiating to all parts; and, even 

 where through the reflection of water a vertical streak is produced, 

 there appears, distinctly marked through the vertical streak of light, 

 the line of the horizon, the demarcation of the land in the foreground, 

 and the outline of the waves in an horizontal direction. In the pictures, 

 however, of which I am now speaking, the tracing of any detail is per- 

 fectly effaced when it falls in the vertical streak of light. Even less 

 illuminated objects, like houses or figures, form considerably elongated 

 streaks of light. In this manner, therefore, houses that stand near the 

 water, or people in a boat, blend so entirely with the reflection in the 

 water, that the horizontal line of demarcation between house and 

 water or boat and water entirely disappears, and all becomes a con- 

 glomeration of vertical lines. Every thing that is abnormal in the 

 shape of objects, in the drawing, and even in the coloring of the pict- 

 ures of this period, can be explained by this vertical diffusion of light. 

 How and at what time did this anomaly develop itself? 



