Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/1014



N none of his works does that tremendous artist Nature reveal himself so magically as in the airy transformations and changing harmonies of the clouds. Mighty and mystical master, his art is here seen at its strangest and its simplest. How few and intangible his materials; how apparently simple his methods—vapor and currents of air and the old sun and moon; and yet what an impressive and mysterious beauty he creates from them, there on the canvas of the sky! Nowhere else is he seen so triumphantly as an artist of pure effect. Elsewhere we may meet with him as a melodramatist of the everlasting hills, a scene-painter of gorge and gloom and the white torrent; but in creating such effects he has employed materials so enduring as to be called everlasting. Nature will be his own Salvator Rosa millions of years after the name of Salvator Rosa has faded from the memory of the universe, because his Salvator Rosas are made of that veritable rock and lightning and ancient darkness which the Italian could only imitate with perishable paint-pot and canvas. But when Nature, so to speak, turns Titian and Turner, he is at a disadvantage in his materials, for the pigments of the clouds are volatile as a perfume, and fade even as the artist lays them on morning or evening sky. With the invisible artist of the clouds it is now or never for his effects, and the pictures he paints are gone even as he paints them, never to be seen again. Perhaps only one eye in all the world has seen them, some lonely figure lost in the twilight—

}

his pictures must pass like a strain of music. Effect, pure effect; not effect caught and fossilized as in sculpture, or arrested awhile as in painting, but effect alive and changing every moment, effect musical in its development—music, indeed, made visible in color.

All human art must pass away, but most of it has a certain spurious stability. If you are rich, you can buy a Titian for the woman you love, but you cannot