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details of every subject being comparatively subordinate, and the colour nearly as principal as the light and shade had been before,-certainly the leading feature, though the light and shade are always exquisitely harmonized with it. And naturally, as the colour becomes the leading object, those times of day are chosen in which it is most lovely; and whereas before, at least five out of six of Turner’s drawings represented ordinary daylight, we now find his attention directed constantly to the evening: and, for the first time, we have those rosy lights upon the hills, those gorgeous falls of sun through flaming heavens, those solemn twilights, with the blue moon rising as the western sky grows dim, which have ever since been the themes of his mightiest thoughts.

42. I have no doubt, that the immediate reason of this change was the impression made upon him by the colours of the continental skies. When he first travelled on the Continent (1800), he was comparatively a young student; not yet able to draw form as he wanted, he was forced to give all his thoughts and strength to this primary object. But now he was free to receive other impressions; the time was come for perfecting his art, and the first sunset which he saw on the Rhine taught him that all previous landscape art was vain and valueless, that in comparison with natural colour, the things that had been called paintings were mere ink and charcoal, and that all precedent and all authority must be cast away at once, and trodden under foot. He cast them away: the memories of Vandevelde and Claude were at once weeded out of the great mind they had encumbered; they and all the rubbish of the schools together with them; the waves of the Rhine swept them away for ever: and a new dawn rose over the rocks of the Siebengebirge.¹

43. There was another motive at work, which rendered the change still more complete. His fellow artists were already conscious enough of his superior power in drawing,

¹ [These Seven Mountains-famous in legend and history-of which the Drachenfels is one, rise inland behind Königswinter, 22 miles south-east of Cologne.]

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