The best painters in landscape have studied in Italy, or France, where the verdure of England is unknown: hence arises the habit acquired by the connoisseur, of admiring brown tints and arid foregrounds in the pictures of Claude and Poussin, and from this cause he prefers the bistre sketches to the green paintings of Gainsborough. One of our best landscape painters studied in Ireland, where the soil is not so yellow as in England; and his pictures, however beautiful in design and composition, are always cold and chalky. Autumn is the favourite season of study for landscape painters, when all nature verges towards decay, when the foliage changes its vivid green to brown and orange, and the lawns put on their russet hue. But the tints and verdant colouring of spring and summer will have superior charms to those who delight in the perfection of nature, without, perhaps, ever considering whether they are adapted to the painter's landscape.
