Note 97 — NUMERICAL CATALOGUE, WITH BIOGRAPHICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE NOTES (continued 3)

An amusing instance of the naïve ignorance of the sea which underlay much of the excessive admiration of Vandevelde is afforded by Dr. Waagen, for many years director of the Berlin Gallery, and author of Treasures of Art in England. At the end of a passage describing his "first attempt to navigate the watery paths," he says: "For the first time I understood the truth of these pictures (Bakhuizen's and Vandevelde's), and the refined art with which, by intervening dashes of sunshine, near or at a distance, and ships to animate the scene, they produce such a charming variety on the surface of the sea." "For the first time!" exclaims Ruskin (Arrows of the Chace, i. 16, 17), "and yet this gallery-bred judge, this discriminator of coloured shreds and canvas patches, who has no idea how ships animate the sea until—charged with the fates of the Royal Academy—he ventures his invaluable person from Rotterdam to Greenwich, will walk up to the work of a man whose brow is hard with the spray of a hundred storms, and characterise it as 'wanting in truth of clouds and waves.'" Dr. Waagen, it should be explained, had, on the strength of his first "navigation of the watery ways" pronounced Turner's works inferior in such truth to Vandevelde. Clearly Dr. Waagen, more fortunate than most of our foreign visitors, had a calm crossing.