Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/654

 624 Painting on a staircase at Burleigh House, and the Canterbury Pilgrims, are among the best known and most popular of Stothard's independent pictures. His illustrations to 'Rogers's Poems' are exquisite little gems. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 — 1851) was not only the greatest English landscape painter, but the greatest interpreter of nature of any time or country. No landscapes convey so natural and complete a sense of light and shadow and atmosphere, or so entire a mastery of colour as his. His great success was only obtained by laborious study, which he pursued with unwearied assiduity, winning secret after secret in years of patient toil, until at last he attained to the zenith of a landscape painter's ambition — the power of rendering sunlight in something of its truth and fulness, a task which had baffled all his predecessors, and still baffles his followers and imitators. Turner's special characteristics have been rendered familiar to us all by the admirable engravings of John Pye, Robert Wallis, and others. Every one has felt the subtle charm of his atmospheric effects, and marvelled at the vivid truth of his rendering of water in every form. The tempest-tossed ocean, the desolate wastes of the sea in repose, the jagged rain-cloud, the drifting shower, the lowering fog, the distant river — all live again on his canvas. But perhaps not every one has fully realized the moral meaning of his works — the pathetic contrasts they so often present between the self - sufficiency of nature, even when most deeply troubled or wildly agitated, and the dependence of man upon human sympathy for solace and support. In such works as Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, the Fire at Sea, and the Shipwreck (all in the National Gallery), the solemn irresponsiveness of the