(Go to Summary of review of Modern Painters I, Westminster Review, August 1843, p. 239.)
In the general scope of this goodly-sized volume we are disposed to agree with its writer, and we think there are few students in art who will not rise from the perusal of it with some increase of positive knowledge. Certainly the work will have set them good mental exercises on the metaphysics of their art, which cannot have been undergone without advantage. The author, like most advocates, rather overdoes his work. That Turner is a landscape painter truer to nature than his most celebrated predecessors, Annibale Caracci, Gaspar Poussin, Claude, Salvator Rosa, &c., we should be inclined to admit with the author; - that his powers are more varied and his attempts much bolder, we should also agree; but granting this much, it is not necessary to defend his extravagances. What more... can justly be said in defence of his 'Moses writing the Book of Genesis,' now in the Royal Academy, than that it is a brilliant muddle of rainbow colours 'without form or void' and that you might behold it with equal pleasure turned topsy-turvy? In his extreme admiration of Turner, the author seems to us not sufficiently alive to the merits of other modern artists, Callcott especially, the most refined and spiritual of all our landscape painters.