25. Solemn Dignitiy in Saddening Colour

Returning now to our subject at the point from which I permitted myself, I trust not without your pardon, to diverge; you may incidentally, but carefully, observe, that the effect of such a sky as that represented in the second diagram, so far as it can be abstracted or conveyed by painting at all, implies the total absence of any pervading warmth of tint, such as artists usually call “tone.” Every tint must be the purest possible, and above all the white. Partly, lest you should think, from my treatment of these two phases of effect, that I am insensible to the quality of tone,—and partly to complete the representation of states of weather undefiled by plague-cloud, yet capable of the most solemn dignity in saddening colour, I show you, Diagram 3, the record of an autumn twilight of the year 1845,—sketched while I was changing horses between Verona and Brescia. The distant sky in this drawing is in the glowing calm which is always taken by the great Italian painters for the background of their sacred pictures; a broad field of cloud is advancing upon it overhead, and meeting others enlarging in the distance; these are rainclouds, which will certainly close over the clear sky, and bring on rain before midnight: but there is no power in them to pollute the sky beyond and above them: they do not darken the air, nor defile it, nor in any way mingle with it; their edges are burnished by the sun like the edges of golden shields, and their advancing march is as deliberate and majestic as the fading of the twilight itself into a darkness full of stars.