819. OFF THE MOUTH OF THE THAMES.
Bakhuizen (Dutch: 1631-1708). See 204.
On representations of rough weather by this painter and Vandevelde, Ruskin writes as follows: "If one could but arrest the connoisseurs in the fact of looking at them with belief, and, magically introducing the image of a true sea-wave, let it roll up through the room,—one massive fathom's height and rood's breadth of brine, passing them by but once,—dividing, Red-Sea like, on right hand and left,—but at least setting close before their eyes, for once in inevitable truth, what a sea-wave really is; its green mountainous giddiness of wrath, its overwhelming crest—heavy as iron, fitful as flame, clashing against the sky in long cloven edge,—its furrowed flanks all ghastly clear, deep in transparent death, but all laced across with lurid nets of spume, and tearing open into meshed interstices their churned veil of silver fury, showing still the calm gray abyss below; that has no fury and no voice, but is as a grave always open, which the green sighing mounds do but hide for an instant as they pass. Would they, shuddering back from this wave of the true, implacable sea, turn forthwith to the papillotes? It might be so. It is what we are all doing, more or less, continually" (Harbours of England, p. 19). In default of the actual sea-wave, the visitor may be recommended to look next at Turner's rough seas (472 and 476). Such a comparison will show how much of the roughness in the Dutch pictures is due to mere blackness, how little to any terror in the forms of the waves, such as Turner depicts.