CXLV
After seeing all the fine pictures in France, Italy, and Germany, one must come to this conclusion—that colour, if not the first, is at least an essential quality in painting. No master has as yet maintained his ground beyond his own time without it. But in oil painting it is richness and depth alone that can do justice to the material. Upon this subject every prejudice with which I left home is, if anything, not only confirmed but increased. What Sir Joshua wrote, and what our friend Sir George so often supported, was right; and after seeing what I have seen, I am not now to be talked out of it.
With us, as you know, every young exhibitor with pink, white, and blue, thinks himself a colourist like Titian; than whom perhaps no painter is more misrepresented or misunderstood. I saw myself at Florence his famous Venus upon an easel, with Kirkup and Wallis by me. This picture, so often copied, and every copy a fresh mistake, is, what I expected it to be, deep yet brilliant; indescribable in its hues, yet simple beyond example in its execution and its colouring. Its flesh (O how our friends at home would stare!) is a simple, sober, mixed-up tint, and apparently, like your skies, completed while wet. No scratchings, no hatchings, no scumbling nor multiplicity of repetitions—no ultramarine lakes nor vermilions—not even a mark of the brush visible; all seemed melted in the fat and glowing mass, solid yet transparent, giving the nearest approach to life that the painter’s art has ever yet reached.
Wilkie.