[P] "The town of Lyons, seated upon a chariot drawn by two lions, _lifts its eyes towards heaven_, and admires there--'les nouveaux Epoux,'--represented in the character of Jupiter and Juno."--_Notice des Tableaux du Musée Impérial_, 2nde partie, Paris, 1854, p. 235.
"The Queen upon her throne holds with one hand the scepter, in the other the balance. Minerva and Cupid are at her sides. Abundance and Prosperity distribute metals, laurels, 'et d'autres récompenses,' to the Genii of the Fine Arts. Time, crowned with the productions of the seasons, leads France to the--Age of Gold!"--p. 239.
So thought the Queen, and Rubens, and the Court. Time himself, "crowned with the productions of the seasons," was, meanwhile, as Thomas Carlyle would have told us, "quite of another opinion."
With view of arrival at Golden Age all the sooner, the Court determine to go by water; "and Marie de Medicis gives to her son the government of the state, under the emblem of a vessel, of which he holds the rudder."
This piece of royal pilotage, being on the whole the most characteristic example I remember of the Mythological marine above alluded to, is accordingly recommended to the reader's serious attention.
6. _Modern Period._ The gradual appreciation of the true character both of shipping and the ocean, in the works of the painters of the last half century, is part of that successful study of other elements of landscape, of which I have long labored at a consistent investigation, now partly laid before the public; I shall not, therefore, here enter into any general inquiry respecting modern sea-painting, but limit myself to a notice of the particular feelings which influenced Turner in his marine studies, so far as they are shown in the series of plates which have now been trusted to me for illustration.
Among the earliest sketches from nature which Turner appears to have made, in pencil and Indian ink, when a boy of twelve or fourteen, it is very singular how large a proportion consists of careful studies of stranded boats. Now, after some fifteen years of conscientious labor, with the single view of acquiring knowledge of the ends and powers of art, I have come to one conclusion, which at the beginning of those fifteen years would have been very astonishing to myself--that, of all our modern school of landscape painters, next to Turner, and before the rise of the Pre-Raphaelites, the man whose works are on the whole most valuable, and show the highest intellect, is Samuel Prout. It is very notable that also in Prout's early studies, shipping subjects took not merely a prominent, but I think even a principal, place.