"Waterfall at St. Nighton's, Kieve, near Tintagel, Cornwall." A lovely girl crossing the rocky bed of a stream—attended by a dog, who is leaping from stone to stone. The action of the dog, his care in the act of springing, is admirable, and shows that Mr Maclise can paint all objects well. This is of the high pastoral: the lonely seclusion of the passage between rocks, the scene of the "Waterfall," is a most judicious background to the figure, which is large. It is most sweetly painted.
We are glad to see Mr Ward, R. A., again in the Exhibition. His "Virgil's Bulls," is a subject poetically conceived. The whole landscape is in sympathy, waking, watchful sympathy, with the bulls in their conflict. Not a tree, nor a hill, nor a cloud in the sky but looks on as a spectator. All is in keeping. There is no violence in the colour, nothing to distract the attention from the noble animals—all is quiet, passive and observant. A less poetical mind would have given a bright blue, clear sky, and sparkling sunny grass; one more daring than judicious, might have placed the creatures in a turbulent scene of storm and uprooted ground; Mr Ward has given all the action to the combatants—you shall see nothing but them, and all nature shall be looking on as in a theatre of her own making. The subject is no less grand on the canvas than in the lines of the poet.
We had fully intended to have omitted any mention of Mr Turner's strange productions; but we hear that a work has appeared, exalting him above all landscape painters that ever existed, by a graduate of the University of Oxford. Believing, then, that his style is altogether fallacious, and the extravagant praise mischievous, because none can deny him some fascinations of genius, which mislead, we think it right to comment upon his this year's works. Their subjects are taken from abstracts from a MS. poem, of which Mr Turner is, we presume, himself the author; for though somewhat more distinct and intelligible than his paint, they are obscure enough, and by their feet are as much out of the perspective of verse, as his objects are of that of lines. "The opening of the Wallhalla," is by far the best, indeed it has its beauties; distances are happily given: most absurd are the figures, and the inconceivable foreground. The catalogue announcement of No. 129 startled us. We expected to see "Bright Phœbus" himself poetically personating a doge, or a midshipman; for it points to the "Sun of Venice going to Sea." His "Shade and Darkness; or, the Evening of the Deluge," is the strangest of things—the first question we ask is, which is the shade and which the darkness? After the strictest scrutiny, we learn from this bit of pictorial history, that on the eve of the mighty Deluge, a Newfoundland dog was chained to a post, lest he should swim to the ark; that a pig had been drinking a bottle of wine—an anachronism, for certainly "as drunk as David's sow," was an after-invention: that men, women, and children, (such we suppose they are meant to be) slept a purple sleep, with most gigantic arms round little bodies; that there was fire that did not burn, and water that would nearly obliterate, but not drown. But more wonderful still is the information we pick up, or pick out bit by bit, as strange things glimmer into shape. "Light and Colour, (Goethe's Theory)—The Morning after the Deluge—Moses writing the book of Genesis." Such is the unexpected announcement of the catalogue. But further to account for so remarkable a jumble as we are to behold, Mr Turner adds the following verses:—
"The ark stood firm on Ararat: th' returning sun
Exhaled earth's humid bubbles, and, emulous of light,
Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise,
Hope's harbinger, ephemeral as the summer fly,
Which rises, flits, expands, and dies."
Fallacies of Hope, MS.
This is unquestionably one of the "Fallacies of Hope"—for it is quite hopeless to make out, the sun smoking his cigar of colour, and exhaling earth's humid bubbles; yet we do see a great number of "bubble" heads, scratchy things, in red wigs, rolling and floating out of nothing into nothing. There must indeed have been very wondrous giants in those days; for here is an enormous leg, far beyond the "ex pede Herculem," rising up some leagues off far bigger than whole figures close at hand. But we learn the wonderful fact, that the morning after the Deluge, Moses, sitting upon nothing, possibly the sky, wrote the book of Genesis with a Perryian pen, and on Bath-post, and that he was so seen by Mr Turner in his own peculiar perspective-defying telescope—for so "sedet, eternumque sedebit," in the year 1843. We know that in this account of it we a little jumble past, present, and future; but so we the better describe the picture; for when the Deluge went, Chaos came. That we may the more easily recognize the historian, a serpent is dropping from him, hieroglyphically. Can Mr Turner be serious? or is he trying how far he may perpetrate absurdities, and get the world to believe them beauties, or that his practice is according to any "theory of colour!" His conceptions are such as would be dreams of gallipots of colours, were they endued with life, and the power of dreaming prodigies.
There is unquestionably an impetus given to historical talent—and there is good proof that such talent is not wanting in this year's Exhibition; Mr Patten has chosen a very grand subject from the Inferno of Dante. "Dante, accompanied by Virgil in his descent to the Inferno, recognizes his three countrymen, Rusticucci, Aldobrandi, and Guidoguerra"—Divina Commedia, Inferno. The subject is finely conceived by Mr Patten. Virgil and Dante stand upon the edge of the fiery surge; they are noble and solemn figures. There is an abyss of flames below, that sends upward its whirling and tormenting storm, driven round and round, by which are seen the three countrymen. They are well grouped, and show the whirling motion of the fiery tempest; we should have preferred them more foreshortened, and such we think was the vision in Dante's mind's eye—for he says—
"Thus each one, as he wheel'd, his countenance
At me directed, so that opposite
The neck moved ever to the twinkling feet."
There is great art in placing the large limb of one of the figures immediately over the fiercest centre of fire—it gives interminable space to the fiery sea—an this part of the picture is very daringly and awfully coloured. We rather object to the equal largeness and importance of all the figures; and perhaps the bodies are too smooth, showing too little of the punishment of flame—they are too quiescent. Dante says, "Ah me, what wounds I marked upon their limbs!" And Rusticucci, who addresses Dante, thus describes their bodies:
"'If woe of this unsound and dreary waste,'
Thus one began, 'added to our sad cheer
Thus peel'd with flame.'"