Nature and Art, September 1, 1806.] 
THE WHISTLING SAND-GROUSE. 
1C5 
ciennes,” De Loutherboiu’g acquired great popularity. 
For Macklin’s Bible (most luxurious of editions, in 
seven folio volumes, published in seventy parts at one 
guinea each !) he painted “ The Angel destroying 
the Assyrian Host,” and “The Deluge the latter 
a particularly spirited and effective performance. 
Dayes, his conte^ ary, suggests, however, that 
he was made a? real painter by the printsellers, 
rather than by th ifficiency of his own genius in 
that respect. For the higher purposes of art, 
his composition was too defective, his drawing 
not masterly enough, and his execution too small 
and delicate. But Dayes greatly admired De 
Loutherbourg’s “ Review of Wai’ley Camp,” in the 
Royal Collection ; especially praising the animals 
introduced, and the cool grey of the general effect ; 
the painter as a rule being prone to a somewhat 
coppery tone of colour. 
In 1808, Turner, appointed Professor of Per- 
spective to the Royal Academy, went to live at 
Hammersmith, in order, it has been suggested, to 
be near De Loutherbourg, of whose works he was 
known to be an admirer. That he should have 
aided in the art-training and forming of the greatest 
of landscape painters is a real tribute to the merits 
of De Loutherbourg. It is something to have been 
even the fuel that helped the fire of a great genius 
to burn the more brightly. 
The characteristics of the old scene-painter’s art 
which attracted the attention of Turner, were 
doubtless the boldness and strength of his effects : 
his rolling clouds and tossing waters ; his sudden 
juxta-positions of light and shade ; his bright and 
transparent, if occasionally impure and unnatural, 
system of colour. He was of another and inferior 
school to Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, and 
Constable, who, differing widely in their points of 
view and in their methods of art, are yet linked 
together by a common love of the natural aspects 
of the objects they studied, and a preference for a 
tender and temperate over what may be called a 
hectic and passionate rendering of landscape. But 
succeeding or failing, De Loutherbourg certainly 
aimed at the reproduction of certain pictorial tours 
de force which they would never have attempted. 
He was an innovator in the studio as on the stage. 
According to modern modes of thought he was not, 
of course, a conscientious worker. His landscapes 
were indeed begun, continued, and completed in his 
painting-room. A few crude pencil lines upon a 
card were enough for him to take home with him ; 
for the rest he relied upon his Inemory or his in- 
vention. But in such wise was the general method 
of his time. Painters produced their representa- 
tions of land and sea after close toil by their firesides. 
There was not much taking of canvasses into the 
open air in the days of De Loutherbourg. 
Pursuing such a system, he became, necessarily, 
very mannered ; and yet, with other and greater 
men, he helped to destroy a conventional manner 
in art. Rules had been laid down restricting the 
artist to an extent that threatened to oust nature 
altogether from painting. It had been decreed, for 
instance, that in every landscape should appear a 
first, second, and third light, and, at least, one 
brown tree. Departure from such a principle was, 
according to Sir George Beaumont and others, flat 
heresy. De Loutherbourg avowed himself a heretic. 
And he ventured to object to the old-established, 
well-known classically- composed landscape, which 
was becoming an art nuisance. The tiling has dis- 
appeared now, but the reader has probably a dim 
acquaintance with the classically-composed land- 
scape. It was somewhat in this wise : in no 
particular country, a temple of ruins on the right 
hand was balanced by a trio of towering firs on the 
left. In the middle distance was raised another 
temple in a more tenantable state of repair, above 
a river crossed by a broken bridge, the ragged 
arches strongly reflected in the water ; at the back, 
in the centre of the horizontal line (gracefully waved 
with lilac mountains), was the sun, rising or setting, 
it was never quite certain which ; whilst little ill- 
drawn, inch-high figures straggled about in the fore- 
ground, and furnished a name to the picture : 
./Eneas and Dido, Venus and Adonis, Cephalus 
and Aurora, Apollo and Daphne, Ac. Ac. De 
Loutherbourg’s dashing sea-views and stormy land- 
scapes, although they might savour a little of the 
lamp and the theatre, did service in hindering the 
further production of the “classical compositions” 
of the last century. 
De Loutherbourg died on the lltli March, 1812, 
at the house in Hammersmith Terrace which had 
been the scene of his exploits as an inspired 
physician. He was buried in Chiswick church- 
yard, near the grave of William Hogarth. 
Dutton Cook. 
THE WHISTLING SAND- GROUSE. 
( Pterocles exustus.) 
By W. B. Lord, Royal Artillery. 
A WAY on the wide table-lands of Central India, 
where the sparse herbage struggles for exist- 
ence amongst the scattered stones and spots of arid 
sand, and where in the far distance the herds of 
black-buck move restlessly along in search of pro- 
vender, will be found the home of the whistling 
sand-grouse. When wandering about, hunting and 
collecting, through tracts of counti-y but rarely 
visited by Europeans, I found these beautiful and 
interesting birds exceedingly numerous, winging 
