Note 37 — THE FRENCH SCHOOL

In a later lecture on landscape (delivered at Oxford and reported in Cook's Studies in Ruskin, p. 290) Ruskin cited Evelyn (who was nearly contemporary with Claude) as another case in point: "We passed through a forest (of Fontainebleau)," says Evelyn, "so prodigiously encompass'd with hideous rocks of white hard stone, heaped one on another in mountainous height, that I think the like is nowhere to be found more horrid and solitary." It is interesting to note how long this ignorance of mountains lasted, even amongst painters. James Barry, the R. A., was "amazed at finding the realities of the Alps grander than the imaginations of Salvator," and writes to Edmund Burke from Turin in 1766 to say that he saw the moon from the Mont Cenis five times as big as usual, "from being so much nearer to it"!