Volltext Seite (XML)
646 THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. [OcTOBER 9, 1885. photographers. Not a few artists have perpetrated them, and, indeed, some of these blunderers were not only clever, but even great artists. Thus, in Turner’s “ Shipwreck,” as Ruskin first pointed out, the stormy waves are without foam, and the air above them has no spray in it. “ None of the white touches in these seas,” he said, “ have in the least the construction or softness of foam"; and he added, although this work displayed “ infinitely more power of figure-painting than ever landscape painter showed before,” yet “in such a sea as this of the ship wreck, the figures, even in the nearest boat, would have been visible only in dim fragments through the mist of spray.” He says, too : “ There is a worse fault in this picture than the want of spray. Nobody is icet. Every figure in the boat is as dry as if they all were travelling by waggon through the inland counties. There is no sense, in the first place, of their clothes clinging to their bodies; and, in the second place, no surface is reflective.” Some few months since, by-the-bye, I was on the South Coast—at Bognor—where I purchased from the studio of a local photographer, whose shop faces the sea, one of the most wonderful photographs of stormy waves taken from the shore that I ever saw. The foam forms were especially curious—torn and rent, and cast upward to a great height by violent action in the most singular way. The air, thick with spray, was realised by the lens with the utmost perfection and accuracy ; while the rush and leap of the furious water, its fierce dash, its sudden rushing back, as if to gain fresh impetus for another spring, the wild shock of its conflict, furious waves struggling one with another in the fiercest intensity of their rage, heaving and sinking, writhing and tossing in a bewildering mass, held me spell-bound before the window in which I first saw it. In a smaller photograph of the scene the effect was that of over-crowding, too much in too little. In the exhibited enlargement it was simply magnificent, as I could not help telling the pleasant young lady from whom I purchased my copy, which I called exultingly a wonderful lesson in seascape. Some splendid examples of skies and clouds are also to be seen in Mr. Donkin’s large Alpine photographs. But to go back, and yet remain with Turner. Do you remember his “ Rain, Steam, and Speed " in the National the other, so perfect is their union. The sky is nearly everything ; all the beauty and expression in that wonder ful painting seem concentrated in it. Take again his “ Line Fishing off Hastings,” and see how essentially the land scape is part of the sky, and the sky of the landscape; how completely in unison are the water and the sky, the motions of the clouds, and those of the waves, both telling in different ways precisely the same story. “ Calais Pier," which Ruskin says was the picture which first bore “the sign manual” of his “colossal power,” is a fine illustra tion of harmony between stormy water, sky, and cloud. “ We have here,” said the great art critic, “the richest, wildest, and most difficult composition,” with “ exquisite appreciation of form and effect in sea and sky.” Although, as he also, with a sharp touch of satire, wrote, “ It is very squally and windy, but the fishing boats are going to sea, and the packet is coming in in her usual way, and the flit fish are a topic of principal interest on the pier. Nobody is frightened, and there is no danger.” I have made (fig. 1) a black and white sketch of the general effect of this picture roughly put in, and altogether without the wonderful detail and softness of the original, but sufficient, perhaps, to lend some force to my remarks as to that unity of effect which 1 am trying to impress upon Fig. 1. collection ? What would that picture be without its sky and its clouds ? You can hardly imagine one part without Fig- 2. the attention of photographic art students as a vital necessity in all good landscape art. One point which 1 have chiefly in view is that of„a focus of light and dark Fig. 3. which the sky gives it, and the water aids, and the way in which breadth is secured by the light sail of the fishing
