“The Palace of Art” takes a turn toward the pastoral in its fourth mood-room, with a meditation on a sweeping landscape as viewed from afar. Unlike the first two scenes—each of which contained a human figure in action in the foreground of the described environment—and the third room in which human civilization played an important role in the allegory, the fourth room instead focuses on the natural landscape and the weather unfolding above it. The “herds upon an endless plain" suggest the possibility of a rural human presence, but the ambiguity of the broadly painted depiction leaves humans' presence uncertain.
The natural elements of land, water and wind again act out the drama of the scene, but in quite different roles than the ones they played in the coastal battle in the previous room. The “full-fed river winding slowly” retains some implied erosive power, yet the “endless plain” spreads across the environment in much the same way the endless sea dominates the iron coast. The contrast between the land's role in this stanza and the previous one moderates the severe tone of the conflict as initially presented. In fact, the “shadow-streaks of rain” represent a source of nourishment for the life that teems on the plain in the form of the herd and the implied grass.
Observing the panorama of the landscape and the cloud activity above it from a removed vantage point enables the speaker and reader to appreciate the cyclical patterns of nature and to contemplate their place in that cycle. John Ruskin's word-painting of a rain cloud above the Alps in his 1843 book Modern Painters, volume I adopts a similarly removed vantage point from which to describe the unfolding natural phenomenon of a “long line [of clouds] describing the curve of a horse-shoe; always coming into existence and always vanishing at exactly the same places; traversing the space between with enormous swiftness” (Ruskin). The formation of rain clouds at a distance demonstrates the seemingly impossible generation of clouds and rain from thin air. John Brett's painting Val d'Aosta captures the entire series of inter-elemental interactions that is implicit in Ruskin and Tennyson's descriptions of cloudscapes over landscapes; rain-streaked storm clouds churning behind a peak evidence the influence of the land on the atmosphere, and the valley that cuts sharply through the mountains reminds the viewer of water's power to wear solid rock down to mere sand over time.
“The Palace of Art” demonstrates and anticipates the role of the artist in relation to the environment being described in the poem itself and also in Val d'Aosta and Modern Painters. The speaker's soul peers into the room from the doorway and appreciates the vast panorama from a position outside of the actual landscape. Quite similarly, Ruskin and Brett depict their scenes from a removed position of overview that does not experience the rain they see in the powerful clouds forming behind the peaks and spilling into the valley. As in “The Palace of Art,” the presence of humans is implied indirectly by the presence of the speaker, and directly but subtly by a nearly invisible shepherdess sleeping in the shadow of a rock in Val d'Aosta. The near-absence of humans is a telling indicator of their insignificance relative to the massive plain, mountains and clouds that dominate the natural landscape.
Meditations on landscapes and cloudscapes provide perspective on the human experience and its ultimate place in the world. “The Palace of Art” shows that the artist, in order to gain that perspective, often observes the natural world from afar—even though he is always in the midst of a landscape of some sort himself. The distancing of the artist in all three works implies the difficulty of capturing an event or environment while one is immersed in it. Nonetheless, the removed vantage point of an artist allows for an observational meditation on a particular, fleeting moment to be frozen in time in the artist's medium of choice. The resulting artwork transmits the natural experience to urban audiences—through the artist's subjective perspective—for their consideration, analysis and appreciation on both the aesthetic and thematic level.
