"The best artists of late, in drawing their landscapes, make them shoot
away, one part lower than another. Those who make their landscapes mount
up higher and higher, as if they stood at the bottom of a hill to take
the prospect, commit a great error; the best way is to get upon a rising
ground, make the nearest objects in the piece the highest, and those
that are farther off to shoot away lower and lower till they come almost
level with the line of the horizon, lessening everything proportionably
to its distance, and observing also to make the objects fainter and less
distinct the farther they are removed from the eye. He must make all his
lights and shades fall one way, and let every thing have its proper
motion: as trees shaken by the wind, the small boughs bending more and
the large ones less; water agitated by the wind, and dashing against
ships or boats, or falling from a precipice upon rocks and stones, and
spirting up again into the air, and sprinkling all about; clouds also in
the air now gathered with the winds; now violently condensed into hail,
rain, and the like,--always remembering, that whatever motions are
caused by the wind must be made all to move the same way, because the
wind can blow but one way at once."
Such was the state of the public mind, and of public instruction, at the
time when Claude, Poussin, and Salvator were in the zenith of their
reputation; such were the precepts which, even to the close of the
century, it was necessary for a young painter to comply with during the
best part of the years he gave to study. Take up one of Turner's views
of our Yorkshire dells, seen from about a hawk's height of pause above
the sweep of its river, and with it in your hand, side by side with the
old Encyclopaedia paragraph, consider what must have been the man's
strength, who, on a sudden, passed from such precept to such practice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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