372 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

it in the picture, almost indicated by it, the lowly church is seen in its secluded field between the rocks and the stream; and around it the low churchyard wall, and a few white stones which mark the resting-places of those who can climb the rocks no more, nor hear the river sing as it passes.

There are many other existing drawings which indicate the same character of mind, though I think none so touching or so beautiful: yet they are not, as I said above, more numerous than those which expresses his sympathy with sublimer or more active scenes; but they are almost always marked by a tenderness of execution, and have a look of being beloved in every part of them, which shows them to be the truest expression of his own feelings.¹

37. One other characteristic of his mind at this period remains to be noticed-its reverence for talent in others. Not the reverence which acts upon the practices of men as if they were the laws of nature, but that which is ready to appreciate the power, and receive the assistance, of every mind which has been previously employed in the same direction, so far as its teaching seems to be consistent with the great text-book of nature itself. Turner thus studied almost every preceding landscape painter, chiefly Claude, Poussin, Vandevelde, Loutherbourg, and Wilson.² It was probably by the Sir George Beaumonts and other feeble conventionalists of the period, that he was persuaded to devote his attention to the works of these men; and his having done so will be thought, a few scores of years hence, evidence of perhaps the greatest modesty ever shown by a man of original power. Modesty at once admirable and unfortunate, for the study of the works of Vandevelde and Claude was productive of unmixed mischief to him: he spoiled many of his marine pictures, as for instance

¹ [Compare Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. xvi. § 25, where Ruskin refers to § 36 here in the course of some further remarks about the influence of Yorkshire scenery on Turner.]

² [For Turner’s study of these painters, see further Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xviii. (“Of the Teachers of Turner”), and compare Lectures on Architecture and Painting, above, § 97.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]