Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/351

 prolific work as an interpreter especially of pictures, and the accompanying illustration of his Stranded Vessel off Yarmouth we place side by side with Cousen's St. Michael's Mount, Cornwall. Brandard executed three fine plates for the "Rivers of France," the Bridge of Meulan, the Light Towers of La Hêve, and Chateau Gaillard. His work for the "Turner Gallery" is well known, and the specimen we illustrate is from that series.

Something must be said in passing as to John Ruskin and his criticism of Turner. He represents the school of critics who have seen in Turner's art something more spiritual and more unfathomable than probably the painter intended. At the opposite pole there is Philip Gilbert Hamerton with sane and well-balanced views who examines Turner more coldly and scientifically. In order to obtain a true estimate of Turner's position in Art it is necessary to correct Hamerton by Ruskin, and to correct Ruskin by Hamerton. They both have a convincing manner, and both have the fatal gift of creating partisans who are inclined to become more pronounced in their views than their teachers.

Between the view of Ruskin that Turner was an "archangel," a being of the most unequalled intellect, and the greatest painter of all time, and that of Hamerton who held him to be a man of genius to be ranked with other men of genius, who had the grand passion for expressing himself in Art, but "the far commoner passion for accumulating money," there is a golden mean, and that the reader must take for himself.