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Fifth Conference 



homely and careful descriptions of scenery in Thom- 

 son and Cowper, and the keener insight and more 

 exulting- delight in the outward world which showed 



o o 



itself at the beginning of the last century in the 

 poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley. 

 If time permitted it would be interesting, and not a 

 little curious, to trace the parallelism between the 

 sister arts of painting and of poetry in successive 

 ages. At the beginning of Christian art you have 

 no landscapes for their own sake, but as backgrounds 

 to the religious pictures of Perugino or Raffaele there 

 are lovely little peeps of the Umbrian Hills. In Mem- 

 ling and other Flemish painters of the same age bits 

 of charming landscape come in rather as decorative 

 accessories to the figures of saints and martyrs than as 

 prominent features in the artist's design. Then, later, 

 Poussin, Salvator Rosa, and the Carracci were de- 

 picting the gloom or savagery of forest scenery, and 

 Watteau, Lancret, and Fragonard the mere prettiness 

 of the poet's pleasaunce, of parks and Dutch gardens. 

 Afterwards Cuyp, Paul Potter, and Claude were be- 

 ginning to rejoice with greater freedom in unsophisti- 

 cated and luminous landscape; and in our own country 

 Morland and Wilson and Gainsborough were depicting 

 rural scenes on canvas, while Cowper and Crabbe were 

 embodying the same tastes in their poetry. And yet 

 later, Turner came to teach us what a loving eye 

 might discern in cloud and sunshine, in rock and 

 river. Mr. Ruskin, to whom we all owe so much for 

 the teaching which has helped us to perceive the 

 difference between the true and the false in art, thus 

 describes what he conceives to have been Turner's 

 message to his countrymen: 



