The Elements of Picturesque Scenery: Or Studies of Nature Made in Travel with a View to Improvement in Landscape Painting, Volume 1

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Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853 - Landscape painting
 

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Page 170 - But having praised the trunk, we can praise no other part of the skeleton. The branches are fantastically wreathed and disproportioned, twining awkwardly among each other, and running often into long unvaried lines, without any of that strength and firmness which we admire in the oak ; or of that easy simplicity which pleases in the ash : in short, we rarely see a beech well ramified.
Page 151 - And yet, in some circumstances, I have seen beauty arise even from an unbalanced tree ; but it must arise from some peculiar situation, which gives it a local propriety. A tree, for instance, hanging from a rock, though totally unpoised, may be beautiful; or it may have a good effect when we see it bending over a road, because it corresponds with its peculiar situation.
Page 259 - Castles and abbeys have different situations, agreeably to their respective uses. The castle, meant for defence, stands boldly on the hill ; the abbey, intended for meditation, is hid in the sequestered vale. Such is the situation of Tintern Abbey. It occupies a gentle eminence in the middle of a circular valley, beautifully screened on all sides by woody hills, through which the river...
Page 151 - ... but it must arise from some peculiar situation, which gives it a local propriety. A tree, for instance, hanging from a rock, though totally unpoised, may be beautiful ; or it may have a good effect when we see it bending over a road, because it corresponds with its peculiar situation. We do not in these cases admire it as a tree, but as the adjunct of an effect, the beauty of which does not give the eye leisure to attend to the deformity of the instrument through which the effect is produced.
Page 150 - ... a column. An easy sweep is always agreeable : but, at the same time, it should not be such a sweep as discovers one side plainly overbalanced. On bleak sea coasts trees generally take an unbalanced form : and, indeed, in general, some foreign cause must operate to occasion it ; for Nature, working freely, is as much inclined to balance a tree upon its trunk, as an animal upon its legs.
Page 79 - When the red sandstone forms the covering of mountains of a different formation, one remarks that they have flattened summits, which form inclined terraces bordered by deep precipices. The slope of these terraces is always parallel with the strata of the red sandstone, and with the slope of the formation on which they rest.
Page 7 - ... would require much more space than can here be devoted to the subject. It may be...
Page 79 - ... the layers appear on so reduced a scale as to become objects of detail in the bank or broken fragments which form the foreground of a picture. Elsewhere they are so large, that they are visible to the eye on a distant mountain, and influence its character, and to some extent its form ; the...

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