NOTES ON THE LOUVRE 469

Colour opposition.

§ 43. The cold grey of the flesh of the body in Titian’s “Entombment” [No. 1584] is brought in the uppermost hand against the cheek of the bronzed face-an intense brown, then against scarlet-below against white, and under the arm against dark blue; the flesh outlines of the child above noticed are in greyish brown, not pink like Northcote-no exaggeration.

Nicolo poussin.

§ 44. After looking carefully at three of his important landscapes-the Deluge, the Eden, and the Gideon-and generally at those scattered through the rooms,¹ I was thoroughly puzzled as to his character, intellectual or moral. In the three landscapes he is cold, artificial, lifeless, feeble, ignorant, conventional, yet always of course a painter; the thing is well painted from beginning to end, and there is always the same quaint power of composition about certain passages. But no words are too strong to reprobate the vileness and meanness of the oak branches and general outline (the foliage being characteristically painted-thorough oak). On the left of the “Gideon” they are as meanly, as they are visibly, composed, and the cottage or town architecture in the valley beyond that on the hill looking like La Riccia, and rather grand, is a curious example of the selection exactly of those forms which I should have called the ugliest, both in feeling and line, in the world, all tiled roofs over half-built walls, with windows exactly in the middle ... [reference to a sketch-book]; the windows, one straight ruled square of grey, flat grey paint, neither varied on edge nor surface, titles ruled straight, eaves straight-all formalized to a physically impossible degree, as if that could idealize such buildings. Consider this as the very and literal anti-picturesque spirit, without grandeur or quaintness or anything else to recommend it.

Water Painting

The trees and hills and water and sky are all grey, the first greenish, the last bluish, passing down into good, though lifeless and joyless, gold in the left-hand corner of horizon, the best bit on the whole of the picture; the sky is cloudy, the clouds cirro-cumuli, neither grand nor mean, not absolutely commonplace, but far less striking or sublime, and very cold in colour; the ground goes down into the water in the usual formal bank, a dull coloured gravel appearing in places, the water not ill painted, reflections rather studied; but enfin, a bit of stagnant water, and there an end. The sentiment of the picture, however, has been well intended; for Poussin has taken the most extraordinary pains to paint the pebbles under the water, in the stream of the foreground, and not only so, but, to my delight, a trunk of a tree has fallen across the stream; it goes under the water, whose flow across it is marked by a gleam of white at the edge, and casts its shadow, detached from it, beneath across the bottom, none on the surface; the pebbles are all of the usual commonplace ill-grouped ellipse-the water lowers their tone a little, and shows chiefly by white touches at edge. Poussin has evidently made a study for it; but with all, it is quite uninteresting, and has none of the ripple or brightness or murmur of a stream.

¹ [“The Deluge” is No. 739 (“Winter, or the Great Flood”); and “The Eden,” No. 736 (“Spring, or the Earthly Paradise”). By “the Gideon” it is clear from the description that Ruskin meant No. 741, the landscape entitled “Diogenes throwing his bowl away.” A young man, standing near Diogenes, is drinking out of his hand; hence Ruskin’s reference to Gideon (Judges vii.).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]