Then a small room devoted to the Spanish and Italian schools,
containing pictures by Murillo and Velasquez. Then the French hall,
where were two magnificent Claudes, the finest I had yet seen. They
were covered with glass, (a bad arrangement,) which rendered one of
them almost entirely _unseeable_. I studied these long, with much
interest. The combinations were poetical, the foregrounds minutely
finished, even to the painting of flowers, and the fine invisible veil
of ether that covers the natural landscape given as I have never
before seen it. The peculiarity of these pieces is, that they are
painted in _green_--a most common arrangement in God's landscapes,
but very uncommon in those of great masters. Painters give us trees
and grounds, brown, yellow, red, chocolate, any color, in short, but
green. The reason of this is, that green is an exceedingly difficult color
to manage. I have seen, sometimes, in spring, set against a deep-blue
sky, an array of greens, from lightest yellow to deepest blue of the
pines, tipped and glittering with the afternoon's sun, yet so swathed in
some invisible, harmonizing medium, that the strong contrasts of color
jarred upon no sense.
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