Industry, landscape and atmosphere collide in the sixth room's abstract environment. The stanza avoids the inclusion of any verbs and instead paints a chaotic scene with nouns, adjectives and relational prepositions that give the environment its depth and kinetic energy. Unlike previous stanzas in “The Palace of Art” that explicitly, if briefly, outline the action and narrative in the scene at hand, this stanza provides the descriptions of “a foreground black with stones and slag” and “All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags.”
This abstract method presents the raw materials but requires the reader to mentally assemble the pieces to create a unique and more highly personalized impression of the scene than a more explicit explanation would trigger. The form of the stanza remains consistent with the rhyming quatrain form of the poem's other stanzas, but the style and tone set it apart from the more-standard styles employed in the rest of the poem. Published several decades before the beginning of the Impressionist movement, “The Palace of Art” pushes back against the pressures of pre-established style and convention.
The chaotic word-painting in this stanza closely resembles the visual equivalent in J.M.W. Turner's later paintings, such as Stormy Sea with Blazing Wreck (1835-40) and Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842). Turner's earlier works adhere to a more classical and straightforward method of representing scenes; his later works mirror this stanza in “The Palace of Art,” with less visual structure other than a strong sense of the elements at play, and more interpretive work left to the viewer.
Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth, in particular, reflects the themes and style of “The Palace of Art,” which was published ten years earlier. The chaotic mix of “snow and fire” swirls above and around the boat as it spews a column of coal smoke into the maelstrom. The “foreground black with stones and slags” in “The Palace of Art” gives a clear and indication of the negative impact of industrial byproducts on the already unwelcoming environment. By featuring a steamboat in his painting, Turner similarly introduces a symbol of industrialized civilization into the otherwise timeless environment of a storm at sea.
“The Palace of Art” and Snow Storm both present chaotic environments that convey a strong sense of mood with an underlying tension that requires some work from the audience to make sense of and interpret. Though the method seems to present a more individualized and subjective view from the artist's abstract impression of the scene, the result proves to be more loyal to the blurriness and chaos of real-time human experiences.
Rather than imposing a sensible, created structure and narrative on the experience, the artist in these examples instead conveys the basic mood and sensory stimuli that define the experience in his mind. The artist still remains a part of the work, as is unavoidably the case, but the effect of the work could be compared to giving the audience a set of raw data rather a processed and polished final conclusion. Some of the content carries with it an inherent tension with other content—industrial slag and fire in opposition to white snow, for example—but the works offer moods and essence rather than argumentation or posturing.
