General Notices. 373 



MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE. 



Art. I. General Notices. 



The Landscape-Painter. — But let us come to the landscape-painters, Na- 

 ture's own limners and interpreters, they who should be not merely the de- 

 lineators, but also the poetical translators, of all that she has of fair or 

 beautiful, of terrible or sublime ; men whose hands should be such servants 

 to their eyes, and their eyes to their souls, that the facts and deeds of the 

 material universe should be conveyed by them to all men in legible and har- 

 monious characters. The landscape-painter is one of that order of Nature's 

 priests whose duty it is to represent, as it is of others to proclaim, the order 

 and excellence of the Creator's works ; and, in this exercise of his function 

 he is required to use the same warmth of feeling, the same ardour of imagi- 

 nation, the same desire to bring out and put forward all that is brightest and 

 best in what he beholds, as the poet is, whose sphere of descriptive action is 

 limited to words, and the extent of whose delineative powers is determined by 

 the white paper and the flowing pen. It has been justly remarked, that the 

 painter of inanimate objects should not attempt to give them merely as they 

 are, that is, as they strike his own individual perception ; but that there 

 should be a certain selection of the good, and a suppression of the bad parts, 

 which may be sure of producing an agreeable effect upon the minds of his 

 fellow men, — that is to say, of his judges. So much of the beauty of an 

 assemblage of objects, or of its ungracefulness, depends upon the frame of 

 mind of the observer, that the reason of this precept is readily perceptible ; 

 and sanctioned, as it has been, by the almost uniform practice of all the 

 greatest masters, it may now be laid down as a fundamental canon of art. 

 The fact is, that the vulgar and uninformed mind is rarely so much touched 

 by the mute language of the creation, the real " harmony of the spheres," as 

 it ought to be : it is dull in perceiving the analogies, and in feeling the asso- 

 ciations, of ideas to which a cultivated mind is all alive, when the eyes are 

 feeding on some exquisite specimen of the Almighty's handiwork : the eye 

 has no communion with the soul, and the ideas that are impressed become 

 easily efFaceable from the barren tablets of the memory. It is not the peasant 

 who feels the beauty of the spot on v/hich he lives ; it is the man who is a 

 reader, a thinker, a searcher after what is good and great; who knows how, 

 not only to admire the glorious works of the Parent of good, but also to 

 praise the beneficent hand that has placed him amidst them. As with men, 

 so it is with rude or partially civilised nations ; the love for landscape-painting 

 is one of the latest tastes that spring up amongst them ; and it is a branch of 

 art that is only beginning to develope itself when the others have reached a 

 state of maturity. " Of all modes of painting," says M. Delecluse, a French 

 critic of great renown, " that of landscape seems to be the one that most re- 

 quires experience of art, and long and laborious observation of nature. Nearly 

 all the famous landscape-painters, Claude Lorraine and Poussin among 

 others, only betook themselves to their styles at a late period, and attained to 

 excellence in them only after long study of nature, and when their well 

 practised hands had overcome all difficulties of practical execution. Land- 

 scape-painting, in the course of a painter's works, holds nearly the same place 

 as descriptive verses and moral descriptions do in those of a poet : in each 

 case they are the results of maturity of age, of the autumn of life : landscape- 

 painting is the last mode that is thought of being adopted ; and it may be said 

 that, in general, the descriptive style in literature, like landscape-painting in 

 art, is only appreciated, and therefore only cultivated, at certain epochs of 

 civilisation, when disgust for men and things leads back the mind to simple 

 ideas, and the grand calm pictures of nature. (^Literary Gazette, June 6. 

 18i0.) 



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