SAMUEL PROUT 313

or points of sudden and dextrous colour are expedients in the works of our second-rate artists as attractive as they are commonplace. But the moving and natural crowd, the decomposing composition, the frank and unforced, but marvellously intricate grouping, the breadth of inartificial and unexaggerated shadow, these are merits of an order only the more elevated because unobtrusive. Nor is his system of colour less admirable. It is a quality from which the character of his subjects naturally withdraws much of his attention, and of which sometimes that character precludes any high attainment; but, nevertheless, the truest and happiest association of hues in sun and shade to be found in modern water-colour art,* (excepting only the studies of Hunt and De Wint¹) will be found in portions of Prout’s more important works.

11. Of his peculiar powers we need hardly speak; it would be difficult to conceive the circle of their influence widened. There is not a landscape of recent times in which the treatment of the architectural features has not been affected, however unconsciously, by principles which were first developed by Prout. Of those principles the most original were his familiarisation of the sentiment, while he elevated the subject, of the picturesque. That character had been sought, before his time, either in solitude or in rusticity; it was supposed to belong only to the savageness of the desert or the simplicity of the hamlet; it lurked beneath the brows of rocks and the eaves of cottages; to seek it in a city would have been deemed and extravagance, to raise it to the height of a cathedral, an heresy. Prout did both, and both simultaneously; he found and proved in the busy shadows and sculptured gables of the Continental street sources of picturesque delight as rich and as

* We do not mean under this term to include the drawings of professed oil-painters, as of Stothard or Turner.

¹ [For William Hunt and De Wint, see General Index.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]