The Reason Of This Is, That Green Is An Exceedingly Difficult Color
To Manage.
I have seen, sometimes, in spring, set against a deep-blue
sky, an array of greens, from lightest yellow to deepest blue of the
pines, tipped and glittering with the afternoon's sun, yet so swathed in
some invisible, harmonizing medium, that the strong contrasts of color
jarred upon no sense.
All seemed to be bound by the invisible cestus
of some celestial Venus. Yet what painter would dare attempt the same?
Herein lies the particular triumph of Claude. It is said that he took his
brush and canvas into the fields, and there studied, hour after hour, into
the mysteries of that airy medium which lies between the eye and the
landscape, as also between the foreground and the background. Hence
he, more than others, succeeds in giving the green landscape and the
blue sky the same effect that God gives them. If, then, other artists
would attain a like result, let them not copy Claude, but Claude's Master.
Would that our American artists would remember that God's pictures are
nearer than Italy. To them it might be said, (as to the Christian,) "The
word is nigh thee." When we shall see a New England artist, with his
easel, in the fields, seeking, hour after hour, to reproduce on the canvas
the magnificent glories of an elm, with its firmament of boughs and
branches, - when he has learned that there is in it what is worth a
thousand Claudes - then the morning star of art will have risen on our
hills.
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