220 TREES IN NATURE, MYTH & ART 



them, though Titian was not to be despised 

 as a business man. Anyhow, he brings us 

 much further on the way towards modern tree- 

 painting. 



Such men, again, as Salvator Rosa, with 

 his " landscape of passion and portent," and 

 the Poussins, to whom a forest has become 

 a far from merely dreadful place, helped to 

 intensify and increase the interest taken in the 

 woodland as a subject, all the errors that 

 Ruskin has found in their work notwith- 

 standing. 



But the man who, up to the close of the 

 seventeenth century, did more than any other 

 to quicken interest in landscape, was the 

 Frenchman, Claude Lorrain. Here, again, 

 the young Ruskin of Modern Painters took 

 up a position which, however right absolutely, 

 at least as to what he condemned, was very 

 doubtfully right as to the omission to recognise 

 good qualities, and to allow for the kind of 

 interest taken in landscape in the painter's 

 own time. Hamerton, on the other hand, 

 looks for and finds much good in him. "The 

 essential superiority of Claude Lorrain over all 

 his predecessors," he says, ''and nearly all 



