40 The Carbon-House Pictures. [JULY, 



induced to make the above remarks, from observing the very characteristic 

 manner in which the incident is treated which gives a name to the exqui- 

 site picture last mentioned. One of the figures in front is firing off a 

 pistol unexpectedly in the air ; while all the other parties including 

 horses, dogs, &c. collected about the entrance of the suttling-booth, are 

 evidently altogether deprived of their sense of hearing ; for not the slightest 

 effect can be traced from it on the countenance, air, attitude, action, &c. 

 of any one of them ! Now this we conceive to be highly characteristic of 

 Wouvcrmans, and that no other painter would have ventured upon it ; for 

 the probabilities are, that all the rest of the picture was finished before he 

 thought of introducing this incident. And why (he thought), when it was 

 all so beautiful, should he either alter it to correspond with the new inci- 

 dent; or, on the other hand, why should he omit the incident merely 

 because it did not exactly fail in with the rest of the picture ? The truth is, 

 that Wouvermans looked at nature and her effects, not with a view to pre- 

 sent the world with transcripts of them, but to make them subservient to his 

 own purposes. He was content to take friendly hints from nature, but 

 not to look upon her as his sole guide, companion, and model. But do we 

 complain of this in Wouvermans ? Assuredly not. Genius must be allowed 

 to choose its own course, and its own means of following that course ; and 

 when we hit upon any method of stopping it, with a view to turn it into a 

 better course, all we shall effect will be to make it go back or stand still. 

 The following is the passage we alluded to above : " As the value of 

 all other landscapes arises from the nature they display, so I would say, if 

 it would not sound paradoxical, that the value of Wouvermans' land- 

 scapes consists in the art. His pictures are like nothing but each other. 

 They are perfectly gratuitous works of art ; and yet we love them almost 

 as much as we do those of nature, and with the same kind of love." 

 V The truth is, Wouvermans was a man of genius, and has invented a 

 nature of his own, which is so lovely in itself, and at the same time so 

 much in the spirit of the real nature which he imitated (not copied], that 

 we not only permit, but admire, in him, what in a man of inferior talent 

 had been a mere impertinence." British Galleries of Art, p. 177-8. 



WE had heard that this collection was distinguished for its Paul Potters 

 by far the rarest, and, perhaps, upon the whole (always excepting Cuyp), 

 the most delightful of the Flemish landscape painters. We were, there- 

 fore, somewhat disappointed in finding but four of his works ; and not one 

 that we can regard as among his very best and most characteristic. The 

 finest, because the most natural, is one on his favourite subject a young 

 bull, with other cattle, in a landscape the cattle occupying the principal 

 portion of the canvass, and the nearest possible point to the spectator's 

 eye. This is an excellent specimen of Potter's most unaffected style; but 

 there is no particular charm in the still-life part of it, and it must be looked 

 at as a group of cattle merely. In this light it is all truth and nature. 

 But the fascination which belongs to some of this artist's productions con- 

 sists in something else than this namely, in that exquisite combination 

 and mutual adaptation of a variety of rural objects, animate and inanimate, 

 so as to produce an impression identical with that received from the real 

 objects themselves, and which no other artist whatever produces, in an 

 equally perfect manner an impression which unites all the pleasure 

 received from the contemplation of the interesting individual details of 

 external nature, with all that resulting from her complete and consistent 

 general effects ; and wherever either of these greatly predominate (as they 

 cio in all the pictures of this artist in the present collection), there is no 



