Then came Claude and found the Wonder of Work in commercial harbours, dominated by necessary lighthouses, and in the hustling cities of Civita Vecchia and Genoa—for it is amid the work, the life of one's own time, that the Wonder of Work is to be found.
Canaletto followed, and saw in the building of Venice the same inspiration that Tintoret found in her history, Titian in her great men. And Piranesi discovered the prisons, the Carceri, to be as enthralling as the ruins of Rome.
Turner imitated Claude. Claude saw his subjects about him; Turner used Claude's motives and tried to rival his predecessor. Claude painted what he saw in his own time; Turner tried to reconstruct his unconscious rival's facts out of his head, and failed even in his rendering of work about him, signally in Steam, Rain, Speed, where an impossible engine conducts itself in an incredible fashion in a magnificent landscape. Turner was not here trying to carry on tradition—the only thing worth doing in art—but to _embêter les bourgeois_—and Ruskin!
Turner's Carthage would not stand up, if built—Claude's palaces do. Turner, too, defying Ruskin—Ruskin anathematising workaday England—was a spectacle. But Turner was sometimes in the right, with Constable and Crome, and they, and not Ruskin, have triumphed. Turner had magnificent ideas, wonderful colour sense, grand composition. But when he came to fact he was often ridiculous or pitiful, simply because he had not observed work, noted facts—and to paint work one must study work. And lately I was given a print from a Book of Beauty by Allom of a coke furnace, while Mr. Joseph Jackson has discovered a painting of a forge by Bass Otis in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts—surprisingly well done, both are, too.
It is far easier to paint a heavenly host or a dream city in one's studio than to make a decoration out of a group of miners, or to draw a rolling mill in full blast. Yet one of these subjects can be as noble as the other, as Whistler proved, when he showed for the first time how in London "the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairyland is before us." That is the Gospel of the Wonder of Work.