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Title: Turner's Golden Visions
Author: Hind, C. Lewis (Charles Lewis)
Language: English
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TURNER'S
GOLDEN VISIONS
BY
C. LEWIS HIND
WITH FIFTY OF THE PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS
OF TURNER REPRODUCED IN COLOUR
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
67 LONG ACRE, W. C.
AND EDINBURGH
1907
'Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful. They are only
visions, but still, they are art, and one could live and die with such
pictures.'--John Constable on the 1828 Royal Academy Exhibition.
NOTE
In writing on Turner one must necessarily make levies on the works of
other authors. I give hearty acknowledgment to Mr. A. J. Finberg's
_Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest_ (printed for His
Majesty's Stationery Office), which he himself has used with skill and
accomplishment in his _Turner's Sketches and Drawings_ (Methuen &
Co.). Among the other books consulted and quoted from are _Turner_, by
Sir Walter Armstrong (Agnew & Sons); _Turner_, by W. L. Wyllie,
A.R.A. (G. Bell & Sons); _The Turner Drawings_, by E. T. Cook
(Pall Mall Press); _The Engraved Work of Turner_, and _Turner's 'Liber
Studiorum'_, by W. G. Rawlinson; the delightful Extra Numbers of _The
Studio_ on Turner, and the excellent little book by the late Cosmo
Monkhouse. Ruskin, of course, is frequently referred to and quoted,
also the inaccurate but indispensable Thornbury, whose _Life of Turner_
all succeeding writers on Turner have borrowed from and upbraided.
C.L.H.
CONTENTS.
PART ONE
A MEMORY: TELLS OF A BOY WHO LOVED TURNER'S 'VIEW OF ORVIETO'
I. The Boy and golden Orvieto
II. The Boy wonders at Turner's Art Life
III. The Boy wonders at Turner the Dumb Poet
IV. The Boy, having become a Man, wonders at the _Inventory of the
Turner Bequest Drawings_
PART TWO (1775-1803)
FROM 'FOLLY BRIDGE' TO 'CALAIS PIER'
V. 1775. Birthplace and Parents
VI. 1790 (aged 15). He exhibits at the Royal Academy, and is described
as a light-hearted, merry creature
VII. 1795 (aged 20). The Drawings of 'the ingenius Mr. Turner' are
stated by a newspaper of the day to be 'tinctured with truth and
fidelity'
VIII. 1800 (aged 25). His first Oil Pictures, and Extracts from his
Sketch-Books
IX. 1802 (aged 27). He exhibits grandiloquent 'Jason' and a simple
'View on Clapham Common'
X. 1803 (aged 28). The Year of 'Calais Pier'
PART THREE (1804-1810)
FROM 'THE SHIPWRECK' TO AN EARLY GOLDEN VISION
XI. 1804 (aged 29). He studies an Eclipse and paints the Sunset
XII. 1805 (aged 30). He paints 'The Shipwreck' for Fame, and begins a
series of 'Delight Studies' for Love
XIII. 1806 (aged 31). The chaos of the 'Hesperides' and the peace of
'Abingdon'
XIV. 1807 (aged 32). He begins the _Liber Studiorum_, and exhibits 'The
Sun Rising through Vapour'
XV. 1808 (aged 33). He writes P.P. after his name and paints in a
Garden at Hammersmith
XVI. 1809 (aged 34). He exhibits the glowing 'River Scene with Cattle'
and refuses to sell 'Bligh Sand'
XVII. 1810 (aged 35). A Quiet Year and an early Golden Vision
PART FOUR (1811-1820)
FROM A JOURNEY TO DEVONSHIRE TO HIS RETURN FROM ITALY
XVIII. 1811 (aged 36). 'Apollo Killing the Python,' and a Picnic
XIX. 1812 (aged 37). He exhibits 'Hannibal Crossing the Alps,'
suggested by a Snowstorm he had seen at Farnley
XX. 1813 (aged 38). Hoar Frost at Sunrise that has Vanished from 'A
Frosty Morning'
XXI. 1814 (aged 39). He paints more Classical Pictures, turns Author,
and is happy at Sandycombe
XXII. 1815 (aged 40). 'A wonderful year,' and a Turnerian Love-Letter
XXIII. 1816 (aged 41). Skies! Skies! Skies!
XXIV. 1817 (aged 42). He sells fifty Water-Colours to Mr. Fawkes of
Farnley Hall
XXV. 1818 (aged 43). 'The Abbotsford Turners' and an auction price of a
Turner Water-Colour
XXVI. 1819 (aged 44). Turner's First Visit to Italy, and an Exhibition
in Grosvenor Place
XXVII. 1820 (aged 45). Return from Italy. He begins to sight his
Mystical Visions
PART FIVE (1821-1829)
FROM 'THE BAY OF BAIÆ' TO 'ULYSSES DERIDING POLYPHEMUS'
XXVIII. 1822 (aged 47). He throws off another 'Norham Castle,' and
prepares to startle the world with 'The Bay of Baiæ'
XXIX. 1823 (aged 48). 'The Bay of Baiæ': A Critic is critical and a
Painter is enthusiastic
XXX. 1824 (aged 49). A Glance at some of _The Rivers of England_ and
_Harhours of England_ Water-Colours
XXXI. 1825 (aged 50). A somewhat barren year, commented on in a bitter
lament by Ruskin
XXXII. 1826 (aged 51). Another unimportant year, in which he leaves
Twickenham
XXXIII. 1827 (aged 52). He paints the Sea in the open, and some
Thames-side Pictures
XXXIV. 1828 (aged 53). The Year when Constable described Turner's
Visions as 'Golden, Glorious, and Beautiful'
XXXV. 1829 (aged 54). The Year of 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus'
PART SIX (1830-1834)
FROM THE 'INTERIOR AT PETWORTH' TO THE PERIOD OF THE 'UNFINISHED' OILS
XXXVI. 1830 (aged 55). He paints the 'Interior at Petworth,' and mourns
the death of his Father, and of Sir Thomas Lawrence
XXXVII. 1831 (aged 56). He turns his 'magic limelight' on 'Caligula's
Palace and Bridge,' visits Sir Walter Scott, and makes his Will
XXXVIII. 1832 (aged 57). He paints 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,' and is
jocular on Varnishing Day
XXXIX. 1833 (aged 58). He paints his first 'Venice' picture, and
repurchases some of his own Drawings at Auction
XL. 1834 (aged 59). Some old Stories and some Ageless Colour Studies
PART SEVEN (1835-1845)
FROM A CONSIDERATION OF THE 'UNFINISHED' OILS TO 'RAIN, STEAM, AND
SPEED,' AND THE LAST SKETCH-BOOKS
XLI. 1835 (aged 60). Some remarks on the 'Unfinished' Oils and
_Blackwood's_ attack on his 'Venice' picture of this year
XLII. 1836 (aged 61). The Reception of 'Juliet and Her Nurse' proclaims
that Turner is beginning to lose Favour with the Public
XLIII. 1837 (aged 62). 'Troubles begin to gather about him. Nothing
will go right'
XLIV. 1838 (aged 63). A 'Nonsense Picture' of 1838 which in 1878
fetched £5460 at auction
XLV. 1839 (aged 64). 'The Fighting Téméraire' and a Sea-Piece on a
Visiting-Card
XLVI. 1840 (aged 65). A contrast between the terrific 'Slave Ship' and
the mild 'New Moon'
XLVII. 1841 (aged 66). How Turner 'did it.' He 'grasped the handle and
plunged the whole drawing into a pail of water'
XLVIII. 1842 (aged 67). 'The Snowstorm and some 'Faultless'
Water-Colours
XLIX. 1843 (aged 68). Visions of Venice, and the First Volume of
_Modern Painters_
L. 1844 (aged 69). He exhibits 'Rain, Steam, and Speed,' and twice
tries to cross the Alps on foot
LI. 1845 (aged 70). Pictures of Whalers, and an Entry on the last page
of his last Sketch-Book
PART EIGHT (1846-1851)
THE YEARS OF DECLINE AND THE END
LII. 1846 (aged 71). The Beginning of Turner's Decline, and a 'Grey,
dim Drawing'
LIII. 1847, 1848, 1849 (aged 72 to 74). He disappears from his old
Haunts, and is interested in Optics and Photography
LIV. 1850 (aged 75). His last four pictures painted in hiding at Chelsea
LV. 1851 (aged 76). The Mystery of the Last Years of his Life revealed
to his Friends, and his Death
PART NINE
AFTER TURNER'S DEATH TO THE OPENING OF THE TURNER GALLERY IN 1910
LVI. Vicissitudes of the Turner Bequest
LVII. 1906. Exhibition of the 'Unfinished' Turners at the Tate Gallery
LVIII. 1908. Fifty-two more 'Unexhibited' Turners shown at the National
Gallery
LIX. 1910. The New 'Turner Gallery' at Millbank
LX. Turner at the National Gallery--and Claude: A Last Look
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. 'NORHAM CASTLE, SUNRISE' (about 1835)--frontispiece
2. 'VIEW OF ORVIETO' (1830). NATIONAL GALLERY
3. 'LUCERNE AND THE RIGHI: EARLY DAWN' (about 1842).
Water-Colour. W. G. RAWLINSON, Esq.
4. 'YACHT RACING IN THE SOLENT'--No. 2 (1827). TATE GALLERY
5. 'BARNARD CASTLE' (about 1827). Water-Colour. W. G.
RAWLINSON, Esq.
6. 'DERWENTWATER WITH THE FALLS OF LADORE' (about 1797).
Water-Colour. TATE GALLERY
7. 'STUDY FOR A PICTURE OF NORHAM CASTLE' (about 1799).
Water-Colour. TATE GALLERY
8. 'STONEHENGE: SUNSET' (about 1804) Water-Colour. W. G.
RAWLINSON, Esq.
9. 'THE SUN RISING THROUGH VAPOUR (1807). NATIONAL GALLERY
10. 'THE DEATH OF NELSON' (1808). TATE GALLERY
11. 'RIVER SCENE WITH CATTLE' (1809). TATE GALLERY
12. 'A MOUNTAIN STREAM' (about 1810). TATE GALLERY
13. 'SCARBOROUGH' (1811). Water-Colour. TATE GALLERY
14. 'SKETCH OF COCHEM ON THE MOSELLE' (about 1831).
Water-Colour. W. G. RAWLINSON, Esq.
15. 'CHURCH OF SS. GIOVANNI E PAOLO' (1819). Water-Colour.
TATE GALLERY
16. 'THE BAY OF _BAIÆ'_(1823). TATE GALLERY XVI
17. 'VIEW ON THE MOSELLE' (about 1834). Water-Colour. W. G.
RAWLINSON, Esq.
18. 'YACHT RACING IN THE SOLENT'--No. 1 (1827). TATE GALLERY
19. 'SHIPPING AT COWES'--No. 1 (1827). TATE GALLERY
20. 'BETWEEN DECKS' (1827). TATE GALLERY
21. 'SKETCH OF AN ITALIAN TOWN' (about 1828). Water Colour.
VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM
22. 'ULYSSES DERIDING POLYPHEMUS' (1829). TATE GALLERY
23. 'THE EVENING STAR' (1829 or after) TATE GALLERY
24. 'INTERIOR AT PETWORTH' (1830)
25. 'THE OLD CHAIN PIER, BRIGHTON' (1830). TATE GALLERY
26. 'ROCKY BAY WITH CLASSIC FIGURES' (1829 or after). TATE GALLERY
27. 'SUNRISE, WITH A BOAT BETWEEN HEADLANDS' (about 1835).
TATE GALLERY
28. 'HASTINGS'(about 1835). TATE GALLERY
29. 'THE SALUTE' (1838). Water-Colour. TATE GALLERY
30. 'ANCIENT ROME, AGRIPPINA LANDING WITH THE ASHES OF GERMANICUS'
(1839). NATIONAL GALLERY
31. 'THE ARCH OF CONSTANTINE, ROME' (1840). TATE GALLERY
32. 'LAKE OF LUCERNE, FROM FLUELEN' (1840 or after). Water Colour.
TATE GALLERY
33. 'THE SNOWSTORM' (1842). TATE GALLERY
34. 'PEACE. BURIAL AT SEA OF THE BODY OF SIR DAVID WILKIE' (1842).
TATE GALLERY
35. 'SAN BENEDETTO, LOOKING TOWARDS FUSINA' (1843). NATIONAL GALLERY
36. 'THE SEELISBERG, MOONLIGHT' (about 1843). Water-Colour.
W. G. RAWLINSON, Esq.
37. 'RAIN, STEAM, AND SPEED' (1844). TATE GALLERY
38. 'SUNRISE, WITH A SEA MONSTER' (about 1845). TATE GALLERY
39. 'TELL'S CHAPEL, FLUELEN' (1845). Water-Colour. W. G. RAWLINSON, Esq.
40. 'QUEEN MAB'S GROTTO' (1846). NATIONAL GALLERY
41. 'LAKE WITH DISTANT HEADLAND AND PALACES' (1840 or after).
Water-Colour. TATE GALLERY
42. 'LAKE OF BRIENZ' (about 1843). Water-Colour. VICTORIA AND ALBERT
MUSEUM
43. 'IN THE VALE D'AOSTA, A PASSING SHOWER' (about 1839). Water-Colour.
W. G. RAWLINSON, Esq.
44. 'SPIETZ ON THE LAKE OF THUN, LOOKING TOWARDS THE BERNESE-OBERLAND'
(1842). Water-Colour. W. G. RAWLINSON, Esq.
45. 'BRIDGE AND TOWER' (about 1835). TATE GALLERY
46. 'SUNRISE, A CASTLE ON A BAY' (1829 or after). TATE GALLERY
47. 'THE BURNING OF THE SHIPS' (1840 or after). TATE GALLERY
48. 'VENETIAN FISHING-BOAT'(1839). Water-Colour. TATE GALLERY
49. 'A SHIP AGROUND' (1830). TATE GALLERY
50. 'THE "SUN OF VENICE" GOING TO SEA' (1843). NATIONAL GALLERY
PART ONE
A MEMORY: TELLS OF A BOY WHO LOVED TURNER'S 'VIEW OF ORVIETO'
CHAPTER I
THE BOY AND GOLDEN ORVIETO
There was a boy who grew up in the seventies of last century when
the name of Turner aroused no particular interest or emotion: he was
a classic, and he was treated with the incurious veneration that is
given to classics. Turner was among the gods, and if a descent to
the ground-floor of the National Gallery, where a selection of his
water-colours was shown, did startle the wayfarer into amazement at the
lyrical loveliness of those visions, compared with the sombre and heavy
magnificence of most of the oil pictures, well, they were by Turner,
and Turner being a classic, was not a subject for debate. He was with
the masters--fit and few--a classic.
I think no one dreamed of the extraordinary revival of interest in
Turner and increasing admiration for his genius that was to mark the
twentieth century, when the 'unfinished oils' were exhibited, and later
when the Turner Gallery at Millbank was opened.
The boy who grew up in the seventies, and to whom, in the first
idealism of youth, Turner seemed almost superhuman, has closely
followed the public manifestations of interest in the flame and fame of
Turner; and now that he is about to write a book on the man of whom M.
de la Sizeranne wrote:--'All the torches which have shed a flood of new
light on Art, that of Delacroix in 1825, those of the Impressionists
in 1870, have in turn been lit at his flame,'--he likes to return
in memory to those days in the seventies when Turner first became
wonderful, something not quite to be explained, in his life.
The boy was taken periodically, for education and pleasure, to
the National Gallery, and as he was led through the various rooms
astonishment passed into bewilderment. The mixed art of the world
was far too complex for the boy's unfolded mind. The clash of
personalities, the astonishing divergencies of the various schools
of painting confused and distracted him, and only when he entered
the Turner room (now dismantled), and was told, what he had already
dimly divined, that the pictures crowded on those four walls were all
by one man, did he find rest for his soul. He did not appreciate all
the Turners, but he grasped their coherency, and realised what he was
told, that they expressed the growth of one mind groping from darkness
to light. Yet it seemed strange to the boy that he who painted the
dark and material 'Calais Pier' should also have painted the gorgeous
fairy tale called 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus'; that the calm and
contemplative 'Crossing the Brook' should have proceeded from the same
brain and hand that willed that wonder of wonders 'Rain, Steam and
Speed,' or the fading loveliness of the picture that was then called
the 'Approach to Venice.' The boy was not old enough to understand the
interest and importance of studying a painter's work chronologically,
which would have made it plain to him why a man could paint the 'Calais
Pier' at twenty-eight, 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' at sixty-nine, and the
sunlight dreams between whiles, in moments of rapturous vision. These
problems did not trouble the boy. He was too young to analyse his
impressions, and they were all forgotten when he was shown the small
picture called 'View of Orvieto.' That remained to him all through
boyhood, and through manhood also, essential Turner, essential Italy, a
dream Italy, but more real than the reality.
Yet 'Orvieto' painted in Rome in 1829, and exhibited at the Royal
Academy in 1830, when the artist was fifty-five, is not one of his
great works. And it is not a view of Orvieto, that is, a correct view.
Turner was an interpreter of the soul of what he saw, not a reporter of
topographical, historical or architectural accuracy. The golden valley
bathed in sunlight, the city on the hill swooning in golden mist, and
the magical fading away of the uplands into infinity, that is what the
boy cared about. All that is pure Turner, the idealist, the visionary,
the lover of light and colour and distances and the enchantments of
nature. Turner too, but dual-natured Turner, is the inept foreground, a
mere contrivance to throw the middle distance back; things pressed into
his service that happened to come to hand, the litter of properties,
the 'drawing-master tree,' the uncouth figures, the unsubstantial
fountain.
Years later the boy visited Orvieto and found the city far less
beautiful than Turner's dream. But by that time he had learnt that the
true artist is not a copyist of nature, that he states his vision,
the effect not the fact. This 'View of Orvieto' remained enshrined
in his heart. To him as a boy it was Italy, and Italy never really
meant anything else to his young intelligence, just Turner's vision of
Orvieto, a golden town on a golden hill under a summer sky; a place
where the sun always shines and where there are little white roads
leading he cared not whither, because they all led to somewhere in
Italy. This is the joy of the artist, a joy that often he never hears
of. This is his joy--to touch a young heart to ecstasy, ay! even by a
second-rate picture, and to keep in that young heart a vision that the
world and time can never destroy, and that a visit to the place cannot
dispel. To that boy Turner's 'Orvieto' meant Italy: since he has become
a man he has wandered through Italy again and again from end to end,
but even now if he wishes to recall Italy, to be kindled by the thought
of that word meaning so much to Englishmen, he still turns to Turner's
picture. For him it cannot fade: it cannot change.
CHAPTER II
THE BOY WONDERS AT TURNER'S ART LIFE
From 'Orvieto' as a starting-point, the boy, who is now a man,
proceeded in time to explore the art life of Turner, dwelling oftenest
on his golden visions, in which this persistent man, eloquent nowhere
but in his art, truly found himself. They were the goals of his
pilgrimage, but few appreciated them. Among the few was honest,
plain-spoken John Constable, who said of Turner's contributions to the
Royal Academy of 1828, which were so unlike his own practical art:
'Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful. They are only
visions, but still, they are art, and one could live and die with such
pictures.' Yet in that year the tale of Turner's golden visions had
hardly begun to be told. He was to go on simplifying and simplifying,
until modelling became subordinated to colour, and the forms and shapes
of things became lost in the effulgence of light.
Was there ever such a life of industrious and progressive work? It
began when he was a mere boy, in the dark court off Maiden Lane near
the Strand; the long, laborious, loving effort ended only with the end,
that furtive, fugitive end when, tired of man and his ways, the old,
self-sufficient painter disappeared from his haunts and his friends,
and under the assumed name of Mr. Booth, the sun his master, the river
his companion, met death in a little balconied house overlooking the
Thames at Chelsea.
Work, work, work--absorbing, concentrated work--that was his life. This
'short, stout man with a red face and covetous eyes,' was hardly what
the world calls a fine character, although there are on record many
instances of his generosity and kindness, he was as secretive about his
work as about his life. The door of his studio, whether in Queen Anne
Street or on the hills was, metaphorically, always locked.
When the boy, who loved the view of 'Orvieto' more than any picture
he had ever seen, began to study Turner's art life he amused and
confused himself by dividing it, as all his biographers have done, into
periods. These he simplified into two broad divisions, first when this
ever-ambitious painter pitted himself against his predecessors and
contemporaries, and later when, entirely disregarding the works of man,
he faced Nature, and challenged nothing less than the source of all
light and colour--the sun.
Turner's art life shows no sudden rush of genius. Step by step he
climbed, and had he died in 1802, at the age of twenty-seven, when
Girtin, his friend and fellow-student, died, we should have had the
record of a youth of great promise, but whose performances were no
more wonderful, if as wonderful, as Girtin's. From the period of
Training he passed to the period of Rivalry. Of the many painters he
strove to outsoar there was none so worthy his challenge as Claude
Lorrain, and to this day, in accordance with a condition of Turner's
will, two of his pictures hang in the National Gallery side by side
with two of Claude's, challenging the Lorrainer from beyond the grave.
The challenger has his desire, but Claude is not conquered. The great
Englishman does not dethrone the great Frenchman on his own ground.
Claude is unrivalled in the balance of his classical pictures, and
in their cool and temperate colour. The real Turner, the Turner who
challenged the sun, had not yet found himself. In his periods of Power
and Splendour, between the ages, say, of forty-five and sixty-five,
dominated by such masterpieces as the 'Ulysses' and the 'Fighting
Téméraire,' Turner disregarded all other painters. And while he was
producing epics this prodigal artist was also throwing off lyrics--the
impulsive water-colours, and those 'unfinished oils,' destined, when
reclaimed and shown in 1906, to raise the art of Turner to the empyrean
of landscape art. They were works of pleasure, easy evocations of his
genius, done quickly and gladly, thrown aside, never exhibited.
Of all the periods of his art life there is none to be compared with
the period contained in the few glorious years when he was past sixty
and drawing near to his seventieth year, the period when light in
all its manifestations obsessed him, when he produced the 'Norham
Castle, Sunrise,' the 'Hastings' with the red sail, the later 'Venice'
pictures, and the later water-colours, so delicate, so flushed with
sunshine that the world of sight seems to be swimming in iridescent
vapour. Finally, there is the period of decline, but what a decline,
that could evoke such a magnificent madness as 'Queen Mab's Grotto,'
and such tumbling splendours as the four classical pictures he
exhibited the year before he died!
The boy who loved 'Orvieto' despaired of ever being able to write
adequately about Turner, so enormous, so diversified, was his
achievement. Sometimes he thought he would like to consider nothing but
the 'Orvieto,' the 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' the 'Sunrise' pictures and
the 'Evening Star'; and among the water-colours a certain dream of blue
loveliness called 'Lucerne' and the red 'Righi,' and perhaps the six
small pictures, phantom ships and fairy skies, that he bequeathed to
Mrs. Booth, and perhaps the four impressions in one frame, sensations
they might be called, of Petworth at evening, mere sunset visions, but
such visions.
What was the nature of the man who controlled these wonders? The boy
read Thornbury's very interesting and very unreliable _Life_, he read
Monkhouse and others, and as he read there rose before him a picture of
the dual Turner, the great artist and the crafty tradesman. A little
sadly he set himself to understand something of Turner the Man.
CHAPTER III
THE BOY WONDERS AT TURNER THE DUMB POET
In thinking over Turner the Man, whom Thornbury called the Dumb Poet,
again 'Orvieto' rose before the boy. The twin parts of that picture,
the earthly foreground and the heavenly distances, continued to
symbolise the dual parts of Turner's nature, as indeed the natures of
all of us.
The first book that the boy read about Turner was perhaps the wisest
and the most sympathetic of all his biographies, that by the late
Cosmo Monkhouse. On page 3 he found two quotations; one astonished,
the other shocked him. They neither astonish nor shock him now because
he is much older, and he knows that if one passage is exaggerated so
is the other. He knows that Turner was neither saint nor sinner, but a
queer-tempered man, with bursts of humour and geniality, and a thirst
for knowledge; a man of genius with a dwarfed nature, uneducated, who
in art moved easily among great things, and who, try as he would, and
he did try, could hardly touch the hem of the garment of great things
outside his art; who loved his work before anything in the world, who
was not cultured, and whose manners were neither pretty nor engaging,
who cared nothing for social conventions, but who went his own rough
way, preferring Wapping and the sailors and the river, and rum and
brown sherry, to the conventional delights and the fine feeding of
Belgravia. Here are the two passages. The first is from Ruskin's
_Modern Painters_, published in 1843, magnificent rhetoric, magical,
and meaning very little:--
'Glorious in conception--unfathomable in knowledge--solitary in
power--with the elements waiting upon his will, and the night and
morning obedient to his call, sent as a prophet of God to reveal to
men the mysteries of the universe, standing, like the great angel of
the Apocalypse, clothed with a cloud, and with a rainbow upon his
head, and with the sun and stars given into his hand.'
The second is from Thornbury's _Life of Turner_, published in 1862.
There is no confirmation of Thornbury's suggestion that Turner ever
'wallowed' at Wapping:--
'Towards the end of his career he would often, I am assured on the
best authority, paint hard all the week till Saturday night; and he
would then put by his work, slip a five-pound note into his pocket,
button it securely up there, and set off to some low sailor's house in
Wapping or Rotherhithe, to wallow till Monday morning summoned him to
mope through another week.'
The boy who was shocked at that extract from Thornbury's _Life_,
following so closely upon Ruskin's eulogy, found consolation in an
understanding passage written by Cosmo Monkhouse. It seemed to explain
Turner.
'He lived in two worlds--one the pictorial sight-world, in which he
was a profound scholar and a poet, the other the articulate, moral,
social word-world, in which he was a dunce and underbred. In the one
he was great and happy, in the other he was small and miserable; for
what philosophy he had was fatalist. The riddle of life was too hard
for his uncultivated intellect and starved heart to contemplate with
any hope; he was only at rest in his dreamland.'
His dreamland served him to the end, to that day in 1851, when the old
war-man, warring always for the beautiful, having lost the cunning of
his hand, but not the vision of his eyes, died gazing on the river, his
old companion, whom he had loved always.
Gradually, the boy who grew up in the seventies, and who knew golden
'Orvieto' by heart, began to form a mental picture of the man Turner,
gathered from the pictures and caricatures of him, and the innumerable
stories, some untrue, many exaggerated, that have collected about the
hairdresser's son who became the world's greatest landscape painter.
His friend and patron, Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, made a caricature of
Turner which shows him as a little man, 'in an ill-cut brown tail
coat, striped waistcoat and enormous frilled shirt, the feet and hands
notably small, sketching on a small piece of paper, held down almost
level with his waist.' Yes, Turner was an odd man, odd in looks, rough
in manner. When he had passed middle age the world meant very little to
him. He cared for nobody: he was hardly interested in Ruskin's magical
extravagance of eulogy. 'My own admiration,' said Ruskin, 'was wild
enthusiasm, but it gave him no ray of pleasure. He loved me, but cared
nothing for what I said.' About the time that Ruskin was lecturing the
world for not admiring Turner, and lashing himself into ecstasy over
his idol, the idol was seen on board the old Margate steamer, studying
sky and water, and eating his lunch of shrimps out of a huge red
handkerchief laid across his knees.
Turner lived outside the world--in his dreamland. When the buoyancy of
youth had passed; when 'dad' was dead, he grew more morose, more untidy
and more exclusive, but his dream did not change. No! it became more
mystical, more subtle, more unrealisable to his ageing eyes. Was he
not in dreamland on that Varnishing Day of the Royal Academy of 1846
when George Parrott made a humorous sketch of him. There were four
varnishing days in those halcyon times, and it was Turner's habit to
send in his pictures merely laid in with white and grey, and to finish
them on the walls. We see him in Parrott's Varnishing Day sketch at the
age of seventy-one, a short, thick-set, clumsy figure, with ruffled
silk hat upon his head and gingham propped against a chair--painting on
a large picture, engrossed, oblivious of everything happening around.
'I am told,' says Scarlett Davies, 'it was good fun to see the great
man whacking away with about fifty stupid apes standing round him,
peeping into his colour-box and examining all his brushes and colours.'
He was in dreamland while the 'stupid apes' watched him.
Did they hope to discover the dreamer's secret? Ah, gentlemen, you did
not find the secret in the colour-box. And the dumb poet could never
have told in words how he produced his pictures, although when he sold
one he was wont to say, 'I've lost one of my children.'
The dumb poet!
There is a chapter in the second volume of Thornbury's _Life_ headed
'Turner's Poetry,' that seemed to the boy who loved 'Orvieto' to
express absolutely, strangely, sadly, how illiterate and inarticulate
outside his art was Turner, and how eager to express the emotions
that moved dimly in his starved brain. Twelve pages of his halting,
imperfect verse are printed, scraps from the longest fragments found
among his papers after death, perhaps a portion of that interminable,
chaotic poem, _The Fallacies of Hope_, extracts from which he used
to append to his Academy pictures. There is hardly a clause that is
coherent, there is no continuous thought, and some words are used in
any sense. The impulse to sing is there, but the dumb poet has not
begun to understand even the elements of the technique of composition.
But the boy dug out and remembered two broken lines, and they became
almost as much a part of his life as golden 'Orvieto.'
'... still the chief advanced,
Looked on the sun with hope...'
'Looked on the sun with hope' might have served for Turner's epitaph.
'Still the chief advanced' might have served as a motto for that
amazing book published in 1909, called _A Complete Inventory of the
Drawings of the Turner Bequest._
When that book in two volumes was issued, the boy who loved 'Orvieto'
as a middle-aged man. Having read the _Inventory_--no, read is not the
word;--when he had spent many hours over it, his wonder of Turner, if
that were possible, increased. And dreaming of the drawings of the
Turner Bequest, set forth so fully and patiently in this book, he
echoed the words of the Director of the National Gallery, who wrote in
the preface, 'There is nothing like it anywhere in the world.'
[1] _A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest_,
arranged chronologically by A. J. Finberg. His Majesty's Stationery
Office. 2 vols. 15s.
CHAPTER IV
THE BOY, HAVING BECOME A MAN, WONDERS AT THE 'INVENTORY' OF THE TURNER
BEQUEST DRAWINGS
Not until the _Inventory_ was published was it possible to realise the
amount of spade work--loving, minute, unwearying--that Turner did from
the age of twelve to the age of seventy-one, spade work that enabled
him to will the golden visions of his maturity.
Everybody who has examined the Turner Bequest of water-colours, and
sketches in colour and in pencil, numbering over nineteen thousand
pieces of paper contained in three hundred Sketch-Books, must agree
that 'there is nothing like it anywhere in the world'; and everybody
must rejoice that, through the munificence of the late Sir Joseph
Duveen, there has now arisen as an annexe to the Tate Gallery the
long, long deferred Turner Gallery, a tardy fulfilment of the Wizard's
desire, one of the few dispositions, besides his eagerness to found
a home for decayed artists, that was clear in his interminable and
muddled will and codicils.
The story of the litigation over the will, and of the vicissitudes of
the bequest has been often told, and it will have to be told again in
its proper place in this book; how the pictures bequeathed by Turner
to the nation were gradually selected for exhibition; how in 1857 the
number had reached one hundred and five; how in that year Ruskin began
to sift and arrange the finished water-colours, the pencil drawings,
the colour sketches, and 'unfinished oils'; how he chose what he
considered the best of the water-colours for intermittent exhibition;
how he rolled up the 'unfinished oils'; how he classified and commented
upon the 'nineteen thousand pieces of paper, worm-eaten, mouse-eaten,
in various states of fragile decay, drawn upon by Turner in one way or
another, many on both sides'; how in 1906 the art world was astonished
and delighted by the exhibition at the Tate Gallery of the 'unfinished
oils' by Turner, reclaimed from the cellars at Trafalgar Square; and
how in 1908 several other 'unfinished' works, described as experiments
'in oil on thin veneer,' and a number of early water-colours and
studies were for the first time exposed.
By that time Mr. A. J. Finberg was nearing the end of his vast work
of cataloguing the Turner water-colours, and the 'nineteen thousand
pieces of paper,' belonging to the nation. The two volumes known as the
_Inventory_ are the monument of his labour, which has been thoroughly
done, indeed, with an attention to detail that wins the gratitude
of all students. Wisely a strictly chronological arrangement was
determined upon. The difficulties were immense, owing to the almost
entire absence of reliable chronological information as to Turner's
movements. He was not the kind of man to babble his plans, and Mr.
Finberg admits that some of his judgments as to date and place are
tentative; but we now have a guide, trustworthy as extreme care could
make it, to the infinite variety of Turner's structural plans, his
daily visions, his notes of things seen and quickly recorded, upon
which his life-work was based.
The _Inventory_ begins with 1787, when he was twelve; it proceeds,
year by year, to almost the end of his life, to 1846, when he was
seventy-one. Almost every summer, one might say every summer, with
painting materials, knapsack, and umbrella, he was off on his travels
through England, Scotland, Wales, or the Continent, and, roughly
speaking, to each year there is a sketch-book. Perhaps general-utility
book would be the better name, for Turner drew and scribbled anything
and everything on the leaves in his almost unintelligible handwriting.
Mixed up with his sketches, we read how he got from place to place;
of articles of clothing in use and wanted; the numbers of bank-notes;
elemental French and German phrases; fragments of poetry, his own and
others; extracts from Sir Joshua's _Discourses_; a cure for the bite
of a mad dog; a recipe for surfeit; criticism of pictures, including
Rembrandt's 'Mill,' Titian's 'Entombment,' and Rubens's 'Rainbow';
notes on the colours of hills; the names of flowers; descriptions of
skies; fragments of letters, such as 'Give my love to Miss Wickham,'
and so on, and so on.
Such things are for the general, for anybody and everybody who is
interested in the commerce with daily life of a man of genius. For
the student of Turner's work, these details of his sketching tours,
chronologically arranged, are invaluable.
The boy who loved 'Orvieto,' and who is now a man, having contracted to
write a book on 'Turner's Golden Visions,' felt, with this _Inventory_
before him, wherein Turner himself tells in disjointed fragments the
autobiography of his working life, that the way to write the book was
to take the years in progression, to dwell on each significant epoch
and the work it produced, and thus to trace the development of the dumb
poet from darkness to light, from the black 'Moonlight at Millbank,' to
such an ethereal golden vision as 'Norham Castle at Sunrise.'
He begins at the very beginning with the year 1775, when a son was
born to two humble people in a dark court off the Strand, whom they
christened Joseph Mallord William Turner.
PART TWO
1775-1803
FROM 'FOLLY BRIDGE' TO 'CALAIS PIER'
CHAPTER V
1775
BIRTHPLACE AND PARENTS
Few of the wayfarers who hurry along Maiden Lane from Covent Garden to
Bedford Street remember that in this busy, refurbished street Turner
was born. London has changed much since his time, and Maiden Lane has
changed also. Hand Court, opposite the Cider Cellar, in which was
the entrance to the barber's shop kept by Turner's father, has long
disappeared, and so has the modest dwelling.
The house in which Turner was born, and where father, mother, and son
lived, is thus described by Ruskin:--
'Near the south-west corner of Covent Garden, a square brick pit or
well is formed by a close-set block of houses, to the back windows of
which it admits a few rays of light. Access to the bottom of it is
obtained out of Maiden Lane, through a low archway and an iron gate;
and if you stand long enough under the archway to accustom your eyes
to the darkness, you may see, on the left hand, a narrow door, which
formerly gave access to a respectable barber's shop.'
Thornbury has the following:--
'I remember the house well--I have been up and down and all over it.
The old barber's shop was on the ground floor, entered by a little
dark door on the left side of Hand Court. The window was a long, low
one; the stairs were narrow, steep and winding; the rooms low, dark,
and small, but square and cosy, however dirty and confined they may
have been. Turner's bedroom, where he generally painted, looked into
the lane, and was commanded by the opposite windows. The house where I
suppose he afterwards went to for more quiet and room, is at the end
of Hand Court, and is on a larger scale, with two windows in front;
but it must have been rather dark, though less noisy than his father's
house.'
It is said that the very early drawing by Turner, called 'Interior of
a Kitchen,' in the possession of the nation, represents the kitchen of
the house in Maiden Lane, and that the old woman crooning over the fire
is Turner's mother; but this has been doubted by that arch-doubter, Mr.
A. J. Finberg. Mrs. Turner's aspect is reported to have been masculine,
not to say fierce; she is said to have been a person of ungovernable
temper, to have 'led her husband a sad life,' to have been odd to the
point of insanity. Indeed she was quite insane at times, and maybe
Turner derived something of his genius from this ill-starred mother
with the unbalanced wits.
It is probable that the Mary Turner who was removed from St. Paul's,
Covent Garden, and admitted into Bethlehem Hospital on December 27th,
1800, was Turner's mother. She was discharged uncured in the following
year.
'Dad' was sane and cheerful, a friend and companion to his son, proud
of his genius, and helpful to him. His name will often appear in these
pages. He is described by Henry Trimmer, vicar of Heston, one of
Turner's few intimate friends, as a chatty old fellow who talked fast.
We are also told that his cheerfulness was greater than his son's,
and that a smile was always on his face. To this strangely assorted
couple, a chirpy father and a crazy mother, a son was born on the 23rd
of April 1775, about one year and eight months after their marriage. So
Nature works, and the good folk who would 'select' parents for their
wholesomeness and sanity may not be as successful in producing a genius
as Nature in her unpremeditated way. Joseph Mallord William Turner was
baptized at St. Paul's, Covent Garden, in the following month.
Ruskin has devoted a brilliant chapter to contrasting the boyhoods
of Turner and Giorgione. But is Turner to be pitied? Art occurs, and
perhaps there could not have been a more suitable place for a great
landscape painter to be born than in a dark court off Maiden Lane by
the Strand. For, being born in a dark court, he had to seek the world
of beauty, the wonder of undefiled sunrises and sunsets, green fields
and purple hills, pale streams and opalescent lakes. He had to make an
effort to find them.
At home there was at least mental excitement. His father's customers
were continually coming and going, curious men from the outside world,
who talked wittily and wore pretty clothes, and gave to the watchful
boy glimpses of the vivid world in which they lived. And near by was
the river, with its shipping, and the ever-changing aspect of the
tides, the old Thames, which he loved all his life, and from which he
derived inspiration and consolation.
CHAPTER VI
1790: AGED FIFTEEN
HE EXHIBITS AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY AND IS DESCRIBED AS A LIGHT-HEARTED,
MERRY CREATURE
As Thomas Stothard was a customer of Turner's father, and as many
artists lived about Covent Garden, the boy's interest in art must have
been early aroused. It is said that at the age of nine young Turner
made a drawing of Margate Church, shortly before he went to his first
school at New Brentford.
An old schoolfellow tells how he drew cocks and hens on the walls, and
birds and flowers and trees from the schoolroom windows; and there is
a story, which has been learnedly revised by _Notes and Queries_, of a
sketch which he made of a coat-of-arms from a drawing at Mr. Tomkison's
the jeweller. At the age of thirteen he is described as short and
thick-set, with grey-blue eyes and arched eyebrows, a handsome boy,
careless of dress, but sturdy and determined.
Turner's education was perfunctory; indeed, he had no real education
at all, but he acquired the rudiments at New Brentford and in Mr.
Coleman's school at Margate. We are told that he made the journey 'in a
hoy, a bluff-bowed cutter-rigged craft, with a long bowsprit and heavy
main boom.' That voyage must have been one of the events of his boyhood.
Mr. Palice, a floral drawing-master, also had the honour of instructing
him, and Mr. Thomas Malton, a perspective draughtsman. Later he
learnt something at Paul Sandby's Drawing Academy in St. Martin's
Lane, but more from Mr. Hardwick, the architect, who employed him in
adding landscape backgrounds to plans, etc., and who introduced him,
it is believed, to the schools of the Royal Academy, where we find
him enrolled as a student in 1789. But all this was fugitive and not
very important. His real lifelong teacher was Nature, and he learnt
how to express the ways of Nature by first studying the works of his
contemporaries and predecessors.
He developed slowly. 'Folly Bridge and Bacon's Tower,' which appears
as the first item in the _Inventory_, under the year 1787, when he was
twelve, is not an original drawing. Turner showed little or none of
the early facility of genius. For long years he leaned on and learned
from others. 'Folly Bridge' is merely a copy of a steel engraving by
J. Besire of a drawing perhaps by E. Dayes. The colouring, says Mr.
Finberg, is probably the boy's own invention. It is signed and dated W.
Turner, 1787, and hangs to-day on a wall of the new Turner Gallery at
Millbank.
From an early age he made money. His father showed his drawings and
coloured prints in his shop-window, and sold them at prices ranging
from one to three shillings. The acquisition of wealth remained one
of the most persistent occupations of his life. He was 'found out,'
as Monkhouse says, almost in his childhood, was paid for colouring
prints and washing in the skies for architects--excellent practice. The
knowing boy knew it. When, in after life, somebody expressed wonder
that he should have worked for half a crown a night, he retorted that
nothing could have been better practice. Sometimes he received as much
as a guinea. An old architect told Thornbury that he paid him that sum
in the shop in Maiden Lane for putting in a background.
But the most important episode of Turner's boyhood was the meeting with
Girtin, at about twelve or thirteen years of age, in the workshop of
the famous engraver, John Raphael Smith--Thomas Girtin, who was to have
such an influence on his dawning art, and whose personality was to be
one of the happiest memories of his life.
Turner's work up till about the age of fifteen has been summed up thus:
(1) Making drawings at home to sell; (2) Colouring prints for John
Raphael Smith; (3) Washing in backgrounds for architects; (4) Sketching
with Girtin.
Even in those early days Turner was secretive. Nobody was allowed to
see him draw, and he was as determined as he was secretive. Thornbury
tells the following story:--
'Turner was busy one morning in the bedroom at Maiden Lane, working
at some drawings for one of Britton's patrons--I think for the Earl
of Essex. Suddenly the door opens and Britton enters, nominally to
inquire how the drawings progressed, really to spy out all he could
of Turner's professional secrets. In an instant Turner covered up his
drawings, and ran to stop the crafty intruder's entrance.
'"I've come to see the drawings for the Earl."
'"You shan't see 'em," said Turner.
'"Is that the answer I am to take back to his lord-ship?"
'"Yes; and mind the next time you come through the shop, and not up
the back way. I allow no one to come here "; and so shutting the door
on sly Britton, Turner returned to growl at him over his work.'
The _Inventory_ shows that Turner was hard at work at this early age.
In Sketch-Book No. II., dated 1789, twenty-five leaves are drawn on;
No. III. contains five drawings, and includes his 'First View of
Oxford,' signed and dated 1789. In Sketch-Book No. IV. there is a
pencil outline of 'Wanstead New Church,' against the belfry of which
he has written the word 'Ionic.' As I have said, these Sketch-Books
might also be called general-utility books. Thus, in Sketch-Book No.
V., containing drawings probably made in the Royal Academy Schools, on
the back of a black-and-white chalk of the 'Belvedere Apollo' are these
notes, showing that his busy brain was already beginning to consider
etching, and that he was already indifferent to spelling:--
1 Get an Etching Ground, 26.
2 Heat the Back of P.
3 Rub it over with the Ball.
4 Dab it over with the Dabber of
'Well Hot. {
5 Smoke it over with Wax Tapur
6 Put some ... at back of Palte (? Plate)
7 Re ... of Wax.
Turpentine Varnish and Lamp black.'
About this time Turner began to study oil painting, receiving
instruction from no less a person than Sir Joshua Reynolds. Little did
Sir Joshua think, when he laid down the brush in 1789, that among the
young men in his studio, and perhaps working on his pictures under his
superintendence, was a youth whose name was to become as famous as the
name of Reynolds.
We can tell exactly what degree of accomplishment Turner had reached at
the age of fifteen, as the first drawing he sent to the Royal Academy,
the year being 1790, the locality Somerset House, a view of 'The
Archbishop's Palace, Lambeth,' is in a state of perfect preservation
in the collection of Mr. W. G. Rawlinson. He does not yet show any
originality. It is one of the tinted architectural drawings of the
period, but the work is conscientious, the drawing firm, and the
reflected lights on the houses well rendered. Here, too, are the Turner
figures, taller than life, a little grotesque, but accurate as regards
the costumes.
He must have been a merry, attractive boy when in congenial company:
he did not lack friends. There was Mr. Narraway, whom he visited at
Bristol, and the house of Mr. W. H. Wells, the artist, was open to him,
where he was a constant and welcome inmate. Mrs. Wheeler has recorded
the following charming reminiscences of Turner at this period:--
'In early life my father's house was his second home, a haven of rest
from many domestic trials too sacred to touch upon. Turner loved my
father with a son's affection; and to me he was as an elder brother.
Many are the times I have gone out sketching with him. I remember
his scrambling up a tree to obtain a better view, and then he made a
coloured sketch, I handing up his colours as he wanted them.... Oh!
what a different man would Turner have been if all the good and kindly
feelings of his great mind had been called into action; but they lay
dormant, and were known to so very few. He was by nature suspicious,
and no tender hand had wiped away early prejudices, the inevitable
consequence of a defective education. Of all the light-hearted merry
creatures I ever knew, Turner was the most so; and the laughter
and fun that abounded when he was an inmate of our cottage was
inconceivable, particularly with the juvenile members of the family.'
That is a happy glimpse of Turner the boy, and with that I leave his
boyhood. He has just had a drawing exhibited at the Royal Academy; he
is advancing towards proficiency in water-colour, his first and his
last love; but not yet has he reached the 'golden simplicity' that
Girtin realised, nor the 'silver sweetness' of Cozens.
CHAPTER VII
1795: AGED TWENTY
THE DRAWINGS OF 'THE INGENIUS MR. TURNER' ARE STATED BY A NEWSPAPER OF
THE DAY TO BE 'TINCTURED WITH TRUTH AND FIDELITY'
Five years have passed. Turner is now twenty. We will glance back and
see how he has fared. At about seventeen he attracted the attention of
Dr. Thomas Monro of Bushey, and Adelphi Terrace, physician of Bridewell
and Bethlehem Hospitals, a well-known lover of art, and patron of
certain clever young men who were to raise the coloured topographical
drawing into the well-loved art of British water-colour painting. 'Good
Dr. Monro!' The phrase has become historical. Turner was grateful to
Dr. Monro all his life, although there is no evidence of any great
intimacy between them. Years later he said to David Roberts: 'Girtin
and I have often walked to Bushey and back to make drawings for good
Dr. Monro at half a crown apiece and a supper.' Turner's affection and
admiration for Girtin, that brilliant youth who died young, lasted
all his life. 'Had Tom Girtin lived I should have starved,' he is
reported to have said long afterwards; and of one of Girtin's drawings
he remarked, 'I never in my whole life could make a drawing like that.
I would many a time have given one of my little fingers to make such
a one.' When quite an old man he would mutter to himself about Tom's
'golden drawings.' Thornbury says that he praised Girtin's 'White
House' with rapture.
At Dr. Monro's house Turner, Girtin, Varley, and other young artists
were set to copy drawings by Rembrandt, Canaletto, Gainsborough, and
other masters; also the drawings of John Cozens, Turner's senior by
twenty-three years, who had lately returned from Italy and Switzerland.
Cozens, that poet with the brush, had a great influence upon him, but
Turner's drawings of this period have none of the repose, quiet beauty,
and spacious feeling of Cozens'. Perhaps the 'Pent House, Dover,'
draws nearest to the poetry of Cozens. Simple in treatment and colour,
it shows more imagination than the well-known 'Tintern Abbey' at the
Victoria and Albert Museum.
The 'Bristol and Malmesbury' Sketch-Book, dated 1791, has twenty-three
leaves, all drawn on; the 'Bristol' Sketch-Book of the same year has
seven; and in 1792 we find a drawing of the 'Burning of the Pantheon'
in Oxford Street, a carefully worked water-colour with a large number
of figures. On the left are firemen in their uniforms with hose and
engines, and a crowd of spectators and passers-by. A drawing of the
'Pantheon the Morning after the Fire' was exhibited in the Academy
of 1792. So, at the age of seventeen, while intent now, as for years
to come, on the work of other painters, Turner had begun the direct
study of life, of vivid realities. In the 'Hereford and Worcester'
Sketch-Book, 1792-93, there are 'Two Sketches near Malvern.' Beneath
the second, showing a roadway with foreground trees, the following is
inscribed in his own handwriting:--'The distance last with the sky
a lovely tint of Blue Lake and Indian--more as it approaches.' He
probably knew exactly what he meant. And no doubt the following comment
on the back of a water-colour of a 'Tree and Tower' was all he needed
to impress on his mind the effect of what he had seen:--
'In the shadow the Stones the same. Some Umber and S. Green--the
broken part umber and Bister, the distance part a Blue Green Sap and
B.'
By the year 1795, when he was twenty years of age, Turner was quite
a successful young man. His drawings were hung at the Royal Academy,
he sold them readily, and he had been commissioned by the _Copper
Plate Magazine_ to make a series of water-colours for engraving at
two guineas apiece. In one of the volumes of that publication he is
alluded to as 'The ingenius Mr. Turner.' Moreover, the public press
had begun to notice the work of 'the ingenius Mr. Turner.' Here is a
complimentary contemporary criticism:--
'388. "Christchurch Gate, Canterbury." W. Turner. This deserving
picture, with Nos. 333 and 336, are amongst the best in the present
exhibition. They are the productions of a very young artist, and give
strong indications of first-rate ability; the character of Gothic
architecture is most happily preserved, and its profusion of minute
parts massed with judgment and tinctured with truth and fidelity. This
young artist should beware of contemporary imitations. His present
effort evinces an eye for nature, which should scorn to look to any
other source.'
'Christchurch Gate' was one of five drawings he sent to the Academy of
1794. In 1795, 'W. Turner, Hand Court, 26 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden,'
exhibited eight drawings.
It will be seen from the above extracts from the _Inventory_ how early
Turner became a traveller. He was a traveller almost to the end of
his life, and, whatever else he forgot, he never left his sketch-book
at home. 'No day without a note of Nature' might almost have been
his motto. His sketch-books are the guides to his travels, and when
I turn the pages and follow the wanderings of this unresting man of
genius, there rises before me, as a companion to the sketch-books, the
map that Mr. Huish compiled of Turner's tours through Great Britain.
The lines of his tracks cover the map, those tracks along which he
walked, or coached, or rode, and in their appointed places are marked
the sixty-six castles, the twenty-seven abbeys, and the fourteen
cathedrals that he drew. Some day, when I have leisure, I think I will
make similar maps of his tours through France, Italy and Switzerland.
He would walk his twenty miles a day with his baggage tied in a big
handkerchief, his umbrella in his hand, and often his fishing-rod. But
the clearest vision of him I have is that day in 1792, when, at the
age of seventeen, he started off on his first tour in Wales, on a pony
lent him by his friend Mr. Narraway. To be seventeen, to be conscious
of great powers, all the wide world and the wide future opening, and a
good little pony as companion. Has life anything better to offer than
that?
In the 'South Wales' Sketch-Book of 1795, among the 'Order'd Drawings,'
a list of which he has inscribed on one of the pages, is 'Newport
Castle--Mr. Kershaw.' No doubt this is the 'Newport' now in the Salting
Collection at the British Museum, one of the most accomplished of his
early drawings, pleasant in colour and bold in mass.
CHAPTER VIII
1800: AGED TWENTY-FIVE
HIS FIRST OIL PICTURES AND EXTRACTS FROM HIS SKETCH-BOOKS
Five more years have passed. Turner has made his North of England
tour about which Ruskin wrote so eloquently--and so unconvincingly.
Cosmo Monkhouse, while reproving Ruskin for the partial untruth of his
beautiful prose, says of that 1797 journey:--
'The effect upon Turner of the fells and vales of Yorkshire and
Cumberland seems to have been much the same as that of Scotland upon
Landseer: it braced all his powers, developed manhood of art, turned
him from a toilsome student into a triumphant master.'
Turner was not yet a triumphant master. He had progressed towards
triumph in water-colour, shown in the spacious, harmonious, and
atmospheric rendering of 'Derwentwater, with the Falls of Lodore,'
and the very beautiful 'Study for a Picture of Norham Castle'--rising
golden rocks and rosy sky reflected in the rosy water, one of two early
drawings of this subject, displayed in the new Turner Gallery, and
reproduced in these pages: but oil was still beyond him. He had not
mastered the difficulties of that medium; he could do no better than
the dark and dispiriting 'Morning on the Coniston Fells, Cumberland,'
and the still darker 'Buttermere Lake,' that for years has been
banished to a provincial gallery. The young chief had advanced; he had
been elected an Associate of the Royal Academy; he had removed from
dingy Hand Court to decorous Harley Street; and he was about to make
the acquaintance of Mr. Walter Fawkes, the squire of Farnley Hall,
near Leeds, which was to mean so much to him; but he was not yet a
triumphant master. Only in his water-colours has he begun to show
glimmerings of his golden visions. In oil he is studying detail rather
than light; he is pondering over masses looming in dim airless spaces;
he has not even yet begun to see the ethereal manifestations of his
maturity.
No doubt he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1799 for
the remarkable water-colours that he exhibited in that and in the
previous year, which included the powerful sunset-glowing 'Warkworth
Castle' now at South Kensington; the gloomy and magnificent 'Kirkstall
Abbey' in the Soane Museum, and the 'Norham Castle' with the golden
rocks and the rosy sky of dawn.
Norham Castle was Turner's mascot. He painted that picturesque ruin
again and again; it appears in the _Liber Studiorum_ and in _The Rivers
of England_ series, and 'Norham Castle' is the subject of two of the
'unfinished oils,' disembodied spirits of loveliness, that caused such
a sensation when they were exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1906.
In later life, when Turner was travelling with Cadell, the Edinburgh
bookseller, making sketches for _Provincial Antiquities_, the artist
suddenly raised his hat to the ruins and made them a low bow.
'What are you up to now?' asked Cadell.
'Oh,' was Turner's reply, 'I made a drawing of Norham Castle several
years since. It took, and from that day to this I have had as much to
do as my hands could execute.'
Perhaps the interest of this period for students are certain early
oil paintings, showing the germs, so meagre of promise, from which
his magnificent life-work arose. The small 'Moonlight, a study at
Millbank,' exhibited in 1797, is now so dark that the picture seems
to be encompassed in a perpetual fog, dominated by a round wafery,
whitey-yellow moon; the sprawling 'Morning on the Coniston Fells' of
1798; the 'Caernarvon Castle' of 1800, silhouetted against a cloudy
sky, so small and unimposing, that, remembering what Turner became,
one has for it a sentimental affection; and the dark, disappearing
'Dolbadern Castle' that hangs in the Diploma Gallery in Burlington
House. It was exhibited in 1800; but as Turner was not elected a full
Royal Academician until 1802, this can hardly be his Diploma picture.
The 'Tenth Plague of Egypt,' exhibited in 1802, has been honoured by a
place on the line in the new Turner Gallery at Millbank.
Thomas Green, of Ipswich, is known to fame--or perhaps I should say to
the present writer--for the inscription in his diary of the following
brief criticism of Turner's oil picture, exhibited in the Royal Academy
of 1797, called 'Fishermen Coming Ashore at Sunset, Previous to a Gale
':--
_'June 2nd,_1797.--Visited the Royal Academy Exhibition. Particularly
struck with a sea-view by Turner; fishing-vessels coming in, with a
heavy swell, in apprehension of tempest gathering in the distance, and
casting, as it advances, a night of shade, while a parting glow is
spread with fine effect upon the shore. The whole composition bold in
design and masterly in execution. I am entirely unacquainted with the
artist; but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot fail to become
the first in his department.'
Dayes, an architectural draughtsman, the master of Girtin, said of
Turner:--
'The way he acquired his professional powers was by borrowing where he
could a drawing or picture to copy from, or by making a sketch of any
one in the exhibition early in the morning and finishing it at home.'
Another contemporary remarked of Turner, 'He must be loved for his
works, for his person is not striking or his conversation brilliant';
a third described him as 'eccentric, but kind and amusing.' Blake,
who was one of his pupils, complained of being left quite alone, and
Thornbury states that he was too reserved and tongue-tied to be able
to teach what he knew, even if he wished to disclose his hard-earned
secrets. Turner never disclosed any of his secrets. What he knew he
kept.
The _Inventory_ from 1795 to 1800 fills nearly eighty pages of minute
records of his sketching tours. On one of the leaves of the 'South
Wales' Sketch-Book, dated 1795, I find this, but, with the exception of
the words 'Walls x White Lyon Inn,' not in his own handwriting:--
'To Tenby, 20 miles. Walls x White Lyon Inn. Before you visit Tenby
view the Castles at Llanstephen and Laugharn (Larn as it is called).
Llanstephen Castle stands at the entrance of the River Towy. At Tenby
view the cliffs, caverns, rocks, islands, etc., etc.'
The 'Studies near Brighton' Sketch-Book (1796) contains a drawing of
pigs and a donkey with this note by Ruskin:--
'Both wonderful, quite beyond telling. There is an etching of
Rembrandt's which approaches the upper study, but by no means equals
it. Examine it for a quarter of an hour through a magnifying-glass,
and you will see something of what it is.'
When Ruskin praised, he--praised.
In another Sketch-Book of this period there is a copy by Turner of
Wilson's 'Landscape with Figures'; and in 1797 we find a book full of
Wilson copies, and labelled on the back by Turner himself, 'Studies for
Pictures. Copies of Wilson.' In the 'Swans' Sketch-Book (1798) Turner
has noted on the inside cover in ink a
'Receipt for making an Efficable (?) ointment for Cut ...'
The details of the recipe are confusedly given. On the flyleaf are
several scraps of verse, probably his own. One of them runs:--
'Tell me Babbling Echo why,
Babbling Echo tell me why,
You return me sigh for sigh;
When I of slighted love complain
You delight to Mock my Pain.'
On the back of a drawing of 'Somerset House' (?) is this (I copy the
words just as he wrote them):--
Learn. Substantives
No Comparison but by
Adjectives, as, good bonne
bad, Beau, fine Positive
Plus Beau finer Comparative
le Plus Beau Superlitive of
Finer.
Masculine Le
White Blanc Positive
Whiter Plus Blanc Comparative
Whitest Le Plus Blanc Superlitive.'
Later, in the 'Dolbadern' Sketch-Book, he has copied out a list of
French pronouns and their translations. There is something pathetic in
these attempts of Turner to make up for his lack of education.
The 'Babbling Echo' poem suggests that there may be truth in the early
love-story of which some of his biographers make much. That may or may
not have soured him; it may or may not have been the reason why he
remained a bachelor. I do not think that Turner ever thought seriously
about matrimony. His art was his mistress, and to his art to his dying
day he was loyal, to the sacrifice of everything else. And he was
loyal in his way--or shall I say faithful in his way--to Hannah Danby,
who entered his service in 1800 or 1801, a girl of sixteen; who was
housekeeper in Queen Anne Street through his long life; and who, in the
end, when he had done all his great work, found him dying in hiding
as Mr. Booth, 'husband' of Mrs. Booth, in the little house at Chelsea
overlooking the river.
CHAPTER IX
1802: AGED TWENTY-SEVEN
HE EXHIBITS GRANDILOQUENT 'JASON' AND A SIMPLE 'VIEW ON CLAPHAM COMMON'
Sometimes in early life Turner, one might say almost by chance,
prefigures the golden visions of his maturity, as in 'Conway Castle,'
in the possession of the Duke of Westminster, which dates from about
this time. The foreground is awkward, and strewn with meaningless
litter; but the castle stands up magnificently against the blue sky,
darkening to orange at the horizon, and over all is a ripe golden
glow. You see this picture across the gallery, as at the Japan-British
exhibition, where it was shown. It calls: you are held by the dawning
magnificence of Turner at twenty-seven; you realise that the magician
has begun to work his spell.
The sketch-books of 1801 and 1802 are numerous and varied, showing
his travels at home and abroad: the itinerary of his first tour on
the Continent; the 'Calais Pier' Sketch-Book, with such drawings as
'Group of Figures on Pier watching Fishing-Boats at Sea,' one of the
many studies he made for his great picture of 'Calais Pier'; and the
curious and interesting 'Studies in the Louvre' Sketch-Book, in which
we find this indefatigable young man of twenty-seven not only sitting
at the feet of, but metaphorically throwing himself into the arms of,
the Old Masters. He makes copies of many pictures, such as Titian's
'Entombment,' 'Mars and Venus' by Domenichino, Rembrandt's 'Good
Samaritan,' and to some of the copies he appends long descriptive
criticisms that often elude our efforts to find their meaning.
His comment on 'The Deluge' by Nicholas Poussin begins:--'
The colour of this picture impresses the subject more than the
incidents, which are by no means fortunate either to place, position,
or colour, as they are separate spots untoned by the ... (? dark)
colour that pervades the whole.'
And here is his confused criticism of Rubens's 'Landscape with a
Rainbow':--
'The Rainbow appears to me the most to be considered as a picture, not
but this as well as the rest of his landscapes is defective as light
and the ... (? profusion) of nature. The woman in blue strikes the
eye and prevents it straying to the confused and ill-judged lines,
but as to the figure (? figures) in Mid, which is light ... (? lit
from) the opposite side, a proof that he wanted light on that side and
either chose to commit an error than continue the light by means of
the ground or (? to) where the sky is placed. Then it is lead by the
yellow within the trees to the sky and thence to the Bow, which is
hard and horny by the use of the vivid Blue in the distance, which is
another instance of his distorting what he was ignorant of--natural
effect.'
Among the pictures Turner exhibited this year are 'Jason in Search of
the Golden Fleece,' the earliest of his dragon pictures, that sometimes
seem rather grand, but usually merely grandiloquent. It was probably
inspired by Salvator Rosa. Turner referred to 'Jason' in later years as
'an old favourite with some,' and Ruskin thought 'Jason' showed 'high
imaginative faculty.' How Ruskin studied Turner! Listen to this from
_Modern Painters--_:
'In very sunny days a keen-eyed spectator may discern, even where the
picture hangs now, something in the middle of it like the arch of an
ill-built drain. This is a coil of the dragon beginning to unroll
himself.'
'Jason' is now well shown at the new Turner Gallery, but I, for one,
infinitely prefer the bold study for this composition, hanging in an
adjoining room. Sketch-Book LXI. is called the 'Jason' Sketch-Book.
To this period of his bolder experiments in oil belong such breezy
works as 'Dutch Boats in a Gale' at Bridgewater House, and 'Fishing
Boats in a Stiff Breeze,' both done in emulation of Van de Velde.
Turner said that seeing a fine Van de Velde in a shop-window had made
him a sea-painter.
In a letter from Andrew Caldwell to Bishop Percy, dated 14th June 1802,
Turner is spoken of 'as beating Loutherbourg and every other artist all
to nothing.'
It was not difficult for Turner to beat Van de Velde and de
Loutherbourg all to nothing. We think so now, they thought so then, if
Andrew Caldwell expressed the general opinion.
'A new artist has started up--one Turner. He had before exhibited
stained drawings, but now paints landscapes in oil, beats Loutherbourg
and every other artist all to nothing. A painter of my acquaintance
and a good judge declares his painting is magic; that it is worth
every landscape painter's while to make a pilgrimage to see and study
his works. Loutherbourg, he used to think of so highly, appears now
mediocre.'
But even in those days of rivalry with the so-called classical
painters, Turner was already beginning to see for himself, and to
express what his eyes saw. The 'View on Clapham Common,' probably
painted in 1802, merely a study of sward and trees with men angling, is
personal and all himself, although Ruskin thought that 'the somewhat
affected rolling and loading of the colour in the sky is founded
altogether on Morland.'
To me it is like a brief personal and sincere utterance at a political
meeting where the speakers are all trying to say the effective thing
in the effective manner. Even such a doughty critic as Meier Graefe
recognises in this simple little picture a 'sincere surrender to the
object.'
At the Tate Gallery we may see Turner, painted by himself, in the year
that he took that walk on Clapham Common, a watchful, introspective
face as of a soul trying to see through the veil, the eyes estimating
and observant, the lips betokening something sensual, the other part of
Turner.
CHAPTER X
1803: AGED TWENTY-EIGHT
THE YEAR OF 'CALAIS PIER'
Of the pictures Turner sent to the Royal Academy of 1803, including a
'Holy Family' (he tried everything in turn), one work dominates the
group--the great, dark, studio-made 'Calais Pier,' which Turner, never
afraid of a long title, called 'Calais Pier with French Poissards
preparing for Sea, an English Packet arriving.' Neither Turner nor
anybody else ever saw such a scene in Nature, and one wonders what
Turner thought of this ambition of his youth years later when he
painted the pearly visions of the 'Yachting' and 'Whalers' series, or
such an attempt to express the marriage of light and water as 'Sunrise
with a Sea Monster.'
He painted 'Calais Pier' in his dark studio, with half his brain
mumbling instructions to the other half as to how Van de Velde and the
other brothers of the sea would have done it. He made the sketches
from Nature as we have seen; but he had not yet arrived at the
degree of knowledge enabling him to paint a picture without losing
the impulse of the sketch. But Turner had to build his foundations:
he knew that. He could never have painted 'A Ship Aground' in 1830,
unless he had painted 'Calais Pier' in 1803. We may see from the
'Calais Pier' Sketch-Book how minutely he acquainted himself with such
scenes in Nature. On leaf 58 is the following eloquent line in his own
handwriting:--' Our landing at Calais. Nearly swampt.'
Ruskin refers to 'Calais Pier 'as' the first picture which bears the
sign manual and the sign mental of Turner's colossal power.' He also
observes, quite rightly, that nobody is frightened and there is no
danger. And a child can see that it is untrue. Turner was never much
concerned with what we call 'truth.' The effect was his aim, not the
fact. The sky, except for the peep of blue, is black, the whole picture
is dark almost to blackness, but Ruskin sees the first indication of
colour, 'properly so called,' in the fish, and tells the following
story:--
'The engraver of one of his most important marine pictures told me,
not long ago, that one day Turner came into his room to examine the
progress of the plate, not having seen his own picture for several
months. It was one of his dark, early pictures, but in the foreground
was a little piece of luxury, a pearly fish wrought into lines like
those of an opal. He stood before the picture for some moments; then
laughed, and pointed joyously to the fish, "They say that Turner can't
colour!" and turned away.'
The casual wayfarer through the Turner Gallery sees only the
absurdities of 'Calais Pier,' sniggers, perhaps, at the old fisherman
in the boat who is shaking his half-filled bottle of brandy towards
the woman on the pier, the lady having kept the rest for herself. But
the artist who stands before 'Calais Pier' knows what knowledge and
force there is in this dark sea picture of Turner's youth.
Such modern sea painters as Moore, Olsson, and the Frenchman, Matisse,
have, in the beauty and truth of their realism, spoilt us for the old
sea pictures. But they contained something that we have lost. Mr. W.
L. Wyllie, A.R.A., in his book on Turner, says some fine and good
things about 'Calais Pier.' After remarking that in 'Calais Pier' the
light and shade is just that of Turner's studio in Harley Street; that
the inky clouds throw black shadows just as a table or a sofa would
in a room; that the pale blue sky is not reflected anywhere, either
in the tumbling water or on the tarry sides of the fishing-boats, he
continues:--
'And yet when we are back among the conventional black old pictures,
such as 'The Shipwreck,' the 'Spithead,' or even the impossible, gloomy
'Garden of the Hesperides,' we feel that, after all, the old Wizard
was a worker of wonders, and that he in his dark London room, with
little more than black, brown, and grey, could move us to awe, terror,
or wonder by the thousand-and-one secrets which he had at his fingers'
ends; but which we moderns in the struggle to be realistic may perhaps
have forgotten, or even, it may be, have never tried to learn.'
'Calais Pier,' says Thornbury, was the cause 'of one of the most
painful things 'that ever happened to any of Turner's engravers. Lupton
undertook to make a mezzotint of it, but he could not satisfy the
artist.' This is not the proportion of my picture,' said Turner, 'there
is some mistake here. These are perfect dolls' boats,' and so on. After
much loss of time and innumerable corrections, it was left unfinished.
Ruskin says that Turner got tired of his own composition; doubled the
height of the sails, pushed some of the boats further apart, and some
nearer together; introduced half a dozen more; and at last brought the
whole thing into irreparable confusion--in which it was left.
We shall never know to what degree Turner's pictures have blackened.
Burnet says that when the 'Festival upon the Opening of the Vintage of
Macon' was first painted, it was full of vivid greens and yellows. This
blackening of pictures should be an anxiety to all serious painters.
Ruskin really did a great service to Turner, perhaps even greater
than the publication of _Modern Painters_, when he rolled up the
'unfinished' oils and water-colours and deposited them in the cellars
of the National Gallery. Our new joy in Turner, the rush of admiration
and veneration that came when those golden visions were exhibited in
1906, could never have been had not they been protected from the light
for so many years: then, suddenly, to reveal their splendour.
PART THREE
1804-1810
FROM 'THE SHIPWRECK' TO AN EARLY GOLDEN VISION
CHAPTER XI
1804: AGED TWENTY-NINE
HE STUDIES AN ECLIPSE AND PAINTS THE SUNSET
Throughout his life Turner produced, apart from the water-colours for
the engravers, which number nearly nine hundred examples, two kinds
of work--the pictures done for fame, and those for his own delight--a
'Calais Pier,' and a 'Stonehenge at Sunset': a 'Jason' and a 'Norham
Castle.' It is hard to believe that the broad and simple water-colour,
'Stonehenge at Sunset,' with the magnificent sky, was done about the
same time as the 'Calais Pier,' but it was 'Calais Pier' that made
Turner known to the public.
Henceforth he was rarely in want of commissions from influential
patrons, including the Earls of Egremont, Essex, Lonsdale and
Yarborough, Sir John Leicester, Sir John Soane and others. He did
not always sell his oil pictures; indeed, as the years went on they
remained in increasing numbers on his hands; but that was partly his
own desire. Turner was always loath to part with his 'children.' The
bulk of his fortune was made out of the engravings.
Yes, Turner was now a successful man, but he was still, as always, a
student. The Sketch-Books, as I have said, reveal him better than reams
of commentary. Take, for example, the 'Eclipse' Sketch-Book of 1804,
showing how he worked and how he strove to understand phenomena, even
if the wonders studied did not apply actually to the work at hand. The
'Eclipse' Sketch-Book is brief. Here are the descriptions of the six
'Eclipse' drawings he made in black and white chalk:--'
Commencement of Eclipse.
More than half of sun eclipsed.
Sun nearly three-quarters eclipsed.
Sun nearly lost among clouds.
Three-quarters of sun in eclipse.
Landscape with clouds, no sun.'
I shall always retain that mental picture of Turner alone, somewhere,
studying an eclipse; and also the picture of him, alone, at Stonehenge,
studying that solitude, and making of it a water-colour that prefigured
the freedom and sensitiveness of his later work. I see it now, the
brown, simple foreground, the ancient stones erected to record the
appearances of the sun, rising gauntly in the middle distance, and
half the drawing tingling with a sunset sky. Was there ever a painter
so obsessed by sunsets? But towards the end of his life it was
sunrises--always sunrises.
Moonlights, sunsets, sunrises! In them Turner sought light and found
hope.
CHAPTER XII
1805: AGED THIRTY
HE PAINTS 'THE SHIPWRECK' FOR FAME, AND BEGINS A SERIES OF 'DELIGHT
STUDIES' FOR LOVE
In the chronology of Turner's art life, the year 1805 may be summed up
in the words 'He painted "The Shipwreck."' That, probably, was the art
event of the year to him, but I like to think of 1805 as the beginning
of the period when his passion for colour and atmosphere began to find
expression in 'delight studies,' as they may be called. I borrow the
pretty word from Ruskin, who called some of the most beautiful of the
water-colours 'delight drawings.' He also called some of the large
pseudo-classical works 'nonsense pictures.'
Between 1805 and 1810 Turner painted the twelve landscapes in oil on
thin veneer, found in one of the store-rooms of the National Gallery,
wrapped in brown paper, first exhibited in 1908, and now hanging in
Room XIII. of the new Turner Gallery. They formed, with forty early
water-colours, the second instalment of rediscovered Turners. How well
I remember that day! How well I recall the delight of seeing for the
first time the 'Windsor Castle from the River,' and the 'Tree-tops
and Sky.' These were his between-whiles work; impulses of observation
thrown off while he was producing his mammoth pictures, the magnificent
as well as the 'nonsense' ones, painted to astonish the public,
and to show his superiority over all rivals alive or dead. But the
essential Turner was all the while expressing himself in such 'delight
studies'--'unfinished,' merely because he had said all he had to say,
scanned frowningly by his judges and deposited in the cellars of the
National Gallery as not of sufficient importance for exhibition.
And 'The Shipwreck,' which was the first of Turner's oil-pictures to
be engraved in mezzotint, what of 'The Shipwreck'? Surely there is no
need to describe it again. Dark, powerful, splendidly impossible, it
is in the same category as 'Calais Pier.' Gaze at it and wonder, say
for the hundredth time, that the crowded boat in the centre could never
live for an instant in that terrific sea, that clouds do not throw such
inky shadows, and so on, and so on. Ruskin found in it 'delicate and
mysterious grey, instead of the ponderous black'; he also remarked,
which is obvious, that 'nobody is wet.' True, Turner did not mean
to be realistic when he painted 'The Shipwreck.' Perhaps it needs a
painter, who has struggled with sea subjects, to perceive beneath the
absurdities the strength and knowledge that are the foundation of this
work. Mr. Wyllie wrote:--
'I am never tired of looking at this wonderful composition, and the
more I study it the more I find to wonder at and admire. The masterly
way in which knowledge and artifice are woven together, the endless
modulations of light merging into shadow, the variety of the tones,
each little fleck of foam or swirl of inky water seeming to play its
part in the building up of the harmonious whole. The swing and action
of the figures, too, are also among the marvels of this sombre record
of man's battle with the might of the remorseless elements.'
Evidently 'The Shipwreck' did not please Sir John Fleming Leicester,
afterwards Lord de Tabley, its purchaser in 1806 from Turner's studio
where it was exhibited, as much as it pleases Mr. Wyllie to-day. Lord
de Tabley exchanged his purchase for 'The Sun Rising Through Vapour,'
and 'The Shipwreck' went to form one of the mass of hoarded pictures in
Queen Anne Street, that eventually became the property of the nation,
with the 'delight studies,' the nineteen thousand 'pieces of paper,'
and the rest, making altogether the largest amount of work produced,
single-handed, by any artist since the world began.
CHAPTER XIII
1806: AGED THIRTY-ONE
THE CHAOS OF THE 'HESPERIDES' AND THE PEACE OF 'ABINGDON'
Perhaps it is such pictures as 'The Goddess of Discord choosing the
Apple by Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides' that folk have in
mind when they say that they neither like nor understand Turner. And
do the pages that Ruskin has devoted to the 'wonderful Hesperides,'
that futilely magnificent attempt, hardly worth attempting, to outvie
Nicolas Poussin, entice the observer to any closer observation of
'The Garden of the Hesperides'? I think not. We are uninterested in
Turner's dragons, this or any other. What does it matter if 'the mighty
articulations of his body' do roll 'in great iron waves, a cataract of
coiling strength and crashing armour, down among the mountain rents'?
Yet how often, how very often, the wonderful mind of Ruskin pierced to
the truth. What could be better said than this: 'Nearly all the faults
of the picture are owing to Poussin; and all its virtues to the Alps.'
Yes, Turner is here soaring to the mountain-tops, but he is also on
his high earthly horse. Yet, to look long enough at the 'Hesperides'
is to be lost in admiration of those mad mountain forms, and to see
in them the giant workings of the magician's mind. Turner's 'Ode to
Discord,' inspired by the idea of the 'Hesperides,' inspires us less, I
am afraid, than does the picture. Here are two of the lines:--
'The guardian dragon, in himself a host,
Awed by thy presence, slumbered at his post.'
'Venus and Adonis,' which he painted about this time in emulation of
Titian, and which was not exhibited until 1849, is simpler, but let
it pass. Turner had his golden visions, now as afterwards, but he is
too engrossed in competitive fury to rise often to the simplicity
of expressing simply his wonder at the beauty of the world. In the
'Hesperides' Sketch-Book there is a study for the famous and absurd
Dragon, and on the same page is a pen and ink suggestion for the
beautiful picture of 'Abingdon' exhibited in 1810. That was Turner: to
be busy at the same moment with the theatricality of the Dragon and
the peace of Abingdon. But his mind was ever restless, ever pushing
forward. In this year the _Liber Studiorum_ was also engaging his
attention, and other things, too, that have become interesting because
he wrote them down. On page 1 of the 'Hesperides' Sketch-Book there is
a pencil drawing of a building with trees, and written in the corner
are these words--his momentary needs:--
'Varnish
Razor
Blue Black
Bt. Sienna
Fishing Rod. Flies,
Pallet knife
Shoes.'
Turner as Fisherman. A clever writer might compose an essay on that
subject, garnering his material from the Sketch-Books.
CHAPTER XIV
1807: AGED THIRTY-TWO
HE BEGINS THE 'LIBER STUDIORUM' AND EXHIBITS 'THE SUN RISING THROUGH
VAPOUR'
On January 20, 1807, the first part, containing five plates, of the
_Liber Studiorum_ was published. It would need a book to give an
adequate account of the history of this great work of Turner's, begun
in emulation of Claude Lorrain's _Liber Veritatis_ and continued
until 1819, when, being a financial failure, it ceased to appear. The
original scheme of the _Liber_ was for one hundred plates, of which
seventy only and the frontispiece were published, leaving thirty to
make up the number, twenty of which were in various stages of etching
and mezzotinting when the work ceased in 1819. These have passed
through many vicissitudes. Mr. Frank Short has in recent years brought
his accomplished art to the engraving of sixteen of them.
Turner made the first drawings for the _Liber_ when on a visit to Mr.
Wells at Knoekholt in Kent, who persuaded him to undertake the work.
He required 'much and long-continued spurring.' At last, after he had
been well goaded, one morning, half in a pet he said: 'Zounds, Gaffer,
there will be no peace with you till I begin--well, give me a sheet of
paper there, rule the size for me, tell me what I shall take.' Then he
began, and the first five subjects 'were completed and arranged for
publication.'
Mr. W. G. Rawlinson's volume is the authority on the _Liber_,
wherein Turner sought to 'display in engraved form the whole range
of his powers, and to rival on their own ground his predecessors
--Claude, Poussin, Rembrandt, Backhuysen, Cuyp, Van de Velde, Wilson,
Gainsborough, as well as the painters of his day.' Turner made a
hundred or more sepia drawings for the work, eighty-four of which are
in the Turner Collection at Millbank. He etched with his own hand
the foundation outline on the copper plate, which was then handed
over to the professional engravers in mezzotint, who worked under his
supervision, and a hard taskmaster he proved.
To one who is enamoured of the lovely and luminous colour of Turner in
his supreme period, it is a fresh revelation of his power to see a room
hung with first states--rich, velvety, profound--of the _Liber_, and to
find how great is his spell even in monochrome. I know two such rooms,
and never does the spell fail to work. The original sepia drawings
have not this power in equal degree with the engravings, which simply
shows how well Turner knew his business. On this subject Ruskin wrote
the following letter to a correspondent, which was published in the
_Literary Gazette_ for November 13, 1858:--
'You object that the drawings for the _Liber Studiorum_ are not
included in my catalogue. They are not so, because I did not consider
them as, in a true sense, drawings at all. They are merely washes of
colour, laid roughly to guide the mezzotint engraver in his first
process; the drawing properly so-called, was all put in by Turner
when he etched the plates, or superadded by repeated touchings on the
proofs. These brown guides, for they are nothing more, are entirely
unlike the painter's usual work, and in every way inferior to it; so
that students wishing to understand the composition of the _Liber_ must
always work from the plates, and not from these first indications of
purpose.'
Little did Turner care that Claude's rough sketches in the _Liber
Veritatis_ were mere memoranda of his pictures for the purpose of
identification. Turner put his whole heart and soul into the _Liber_,
and also into the business arrangements with the engravers, and with
the public; but that was the heart and soul of a tradesman, not of an
artist. Yet the artist is very evident in his corrections on the proofs
of the _Liber_, as of all his engraved work. His way may have been
rough, ungenerous and grasping, but his corrections were always towards
perfection.
Men love the _Liber_, men whom the modern movement in art does not
intrigue. One I know counts 'The Straw Yard' the most desirable of
his possessions; another has consoled himself for the rigours of life
by acquiring 'Norham Castle,' 'Raglan Castle,' 'Calais Harbour,'
'Aesacus and Hesperie' (engraved by Turner himself), 'The Source of the
Arveron,' 'Ben Arthur,' 'The Peat Bog,' 'The Junction of the Wye and
the Severn,' and some of the plates that Mr. Frank Short has engraved
so beautifully.
At Christie's in the spring of 1910 I saw a private collector acquire
a complete set of the seventy-one published plates, all in the first
state except the 'Aesacus and Hesperie.' He paid but three hundred and
seventy guineas for the set, as the margins were hidden by mounts and
frames. Had the engravings been in portfolios, plain to the eye as
whole and uncut, he would probably have had to pay double that price.
'The meaning of the entire book,' says Ruskin, 'was symbolised in the
frontispiece, which he engraved with his own hand--"Tyre at Sunset,
with the Rape of Europa," indicating the symbolism of the decay of
Europe by that of Tyre, its beauty passing away into terror and
judgment (Europa being the mother of Minos and Rhadamathus).'
Turner's advertisement was simpler:--
'Intended as an illustration of Landscape Composition, classed as
follows: Historical, Mountainous, Pastoral, Marine, and Architectural.'
The letters on the seventy published plates indicate the class to which
they belong. Thus E. P. on the 'Woman with Tambourine,' one of the five
forming the first part, signifies Elegant Pastoral. The proportions
were as follows, Pastoral 14, Elegant Pastoral 14, Mountainous 12,
Architectural 11, Marine 11, Historical 8.
This year, in spite of the anxiety and interest of issuing the _Liber_,
Turner had the energy to tilt at Wilkie.
In the Academy of the previous year high praise had been awarded to
Wilkie's 'Politicians'; so in 1807 Turner produced 'The Blacksmith's
Shop' of which the original title was 'A Country Blacksmith Disputing
upon the price of Iron and the price charged to the Butcher for Shoeing
his Pony.' Turner never lost faith in his own works. Twenty years later
he repurchased 'The Blacksmith' at Lord de Tabley's sale.
The other picture of this year was that glowing and characteristic
Turner, with the sun nearly in the centre of the picture, where Claude
was wont to place it, now called 'The Sun Rising Through Vapour,' but
formerly catalogued as 'The Sun Rising in a Mist,' one of the first
of his large pictures of light and atmosphere. Some of his gold he
outspreads for us, but he is still under the domination of the crowded,
littered foreground. 'It is curious,' says Mr. Wyllie, 'that in this
picture, a work that the painter thought worthy to be bequeathed to the
nation, the figures of the fishermen should be taken almost exactly
from a picture by Teniers, and the men-of-war are the snub-nosed
high-pooped ships of Van de Velde's time, with sprit topmast at the
bowsprit end and lateen mizzens.'
This picture and the 'Dido Building Carthage,' exhibited in 1815, were
bequeathed by Turner to the nation on the condition that they should
be hung between Claude's 'Marriage Festival of Isaac and Rebecca' and
the 'Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba.' These four noble works are
now the feature of the small Turner room at the National Gallery which
represents the painter since the removal of the bulk of his pictures
to the Tate Gallery. The Claudes hang between the Turners, the precise
condition contained in the will having been cancelled by order of the
Court of Chancery. I do not think, as I have already stated, that
Claude suffers from the challenge.
Turner to-day, in the year of his triumph, has those who adore him; but
he also has his Laodiceans, and even those who dislike his work and
confess their dislike. So it has always been. Morris Moore, when asked
by the Lord Elcho of his day if he considered Turner a distinguished
artist, answered:--' No! Turner's early works certainly indicate a
good feeling for colour, but he is absurdly overrated. The hanging of
two such pictures as "The Sun Rising Through Vapour," and the "Dido
Building Carthage" in the immediate vicinity of the finest Claudes and
other noble works of the National Gallery is a disgrace to the country.'
The country has survived many disgraces, and we can manage to survive
this one. All great men have had their detractors, and sometimes the
detractor who comes to curse remains to bless. Such was the case of the
Japanese artist, Yoshio Markino. On page 140 of his book, _A Japanese
Artist in London_, he says:--
'Although I am myself such a great admirer of Turner now, I was not
so until Hara [a compatriot] came. In fact, I hated Turner. Just a
few days after Hara arrived in London, he and I went to the National
Gallery and sat down on the seats in the Turner room.
'I said to him, "The greatest heroes in this world were generally the
greatest deceivers. Don't you think Turner was one of the greatest
heroes and deceivers?"
'"Why?"
'"Why! come and look at this picture of 'Trafalgar Battle.' Look at
these figures! Look at Nelson! What an awful drawing! I think even a
ten years' old child could draw better figures. Oh, Turner was such a
speculator!"'
Hara made no reply. Hara waited. Later he conducted Markino to the
Tate Gallery, where the 'unfinished Turners' were exposed. Markino
continues:--
'I watched one picture more than twenty minutes, then I went back to
some certain pictures again. Those wonderful atmospheric effects! The
colours were breathing! The tones were moving! I had quite forgotten
myself until the closing time came.'
Later he returned to the National Gallery and the Turners 'looked to
him quite different.' He became a Turnerite. On page 144 he announces
that his blind eyes are opened, that he can now see 'the wonderful arts
of Turner.'
CHAPTER XV
1808: AGED THIRTY-THREE
HE WRITES P.P. AFTER HIS NAME AND PAINTS IN A GARDEN AT HAMMERSMITH
Yoshio Markino is not alone in his adverse criticism of the Battle of
Trafalgar, as seen from the mizzen starboard shrouds of the _Victory_,
known as 'The Death of Nelson, October 21st, 1805, at the Battle of
Trafalgar on board the _Victory._ We all admire this work for the
splendour of the decorative scheme, the gathered masses of golden
brown, and the towering fantasy of the sails. To me it is the most
attractive of the earlier pictures. I never look at the details; but
those details aroused adverse criticism while the picture was being
painted, and after exhibition. Turner cared little about accuracy;
he was an artist, not an illustrator. When he was asked to paint the
'Trafalgar' picture as a companion to 'A Sea Fight' by de Loutherbourg,
he had not the slightest intention of producing an accurate
representation of the death of Nelson. He saw the scene decoratively,
and decoratively he painted it.
Some of the contemporary criticisms are amusing. Nelson's Flag-Captain
pronounced it to be 'more like a street scene than a battle, and the
ships more like houses than men-of-war.' A Greenwich pensioner is said
to have exclaimed: 'I can't make English of it, Sir. It wants altering
altogether.' Another remarked: 'What a Trafalgar! It is a d----d deal
more like a brickfield.'
Turner was instructed daily, while painting 'The Death of Nelson,' by
the naval men about the court, and it is said that on eleven successive
occasions he altered the rigging to suit the fancy of eleven successive
naval visitors. Turner treated their criticisms as jokes: they amused
him. He knew precisely what he meant to do. 'The Death of Nelson' was
shown at the British Institution; later he painted another version,
which is now at Greenwich Hospital.
To the Royal Academy he sent 'The Unpaid Bill, or the Doctor reproving
his Son's Prodigality.' I have not seen this picture, which suggests
Wilkie, and is probably not worth a journey of discovery.
In the Royal Academy catalogue of this year, 1808, we find for the
first time the words, Professor of Perspective, after Turner's name,
and in addition to the address 64 Harley Street, that of West End,
Upper Mall, Hammersmith.
Turner was proud of his Professorship; this he showed by often
affixing, in his correspondence, the letters P.P. to his name.
As might be expected, his lectures on Perspective were unlike the
lectures of any other professor. Thornbury remarks: 'When Turner
lectured on perspective he was often at a loss to find words to express
the views he wished to communicate, but when the spirit did stir within
him, and he could find utterance to his thoughts, he soared as high
above the common order of lecturers as he did in the regions of art.'
Thornbury, whose stories and comments one always quotes with
trepidation, his inaccuracies being so consistent, continues with the
following humorous paragraph:--
'Turner's want of expression rendered him almost useless as a
Professor of Perspective, though he took great pains to prepare the
most learned diagrams. He confessed that he knew much more of the
art than he could explain. His sketch-books contain many drawings
evidently made in preparation for these lectures. On one memorable
occasion the hour had come for his lecture. The Professor arrived--the
buzz of the students subsided. The Professor mounts his desk--every
eye is fixed on him and on his blackboard. But the Professor is
uneasy--he is perturbed. He dives now into one pocket--now into the
other--no! Now he begins, but what he says is 'Gentlemen, I've
been and left my lecture in the hackney-coach.' I have no doubt the
Professor would rather have painted five epical pictures than have had
to deliver one lecture on Perspective.'
Among the Turner relics lent by Mr. C. Mallord Turner to the Tate
Gallery are the manuscripts of the Lectures on Perspective. Mr. D. C.
MCColl, in an article on 'Turner's Lectures at the Academy' which he
contributed to the _Burlington Magazine_, said:--
'I am not yet in a position to say whether the labour of disentangling
that part of the text which deals with the ordinary problems of
perspective, would be repaid by its result; but the series concludes
with a review of landscape painting by Turner, which certainly
deserved to be printed. However halting in expression, Turner's word
upon Dürer, Holbein, Titian, Rubens, Claude, Wilson and Gainsborough
should not be lost. The lecture also on 'Reflexes'--_i.e._ reflections
of light and colour--and incidental passages in the other lectures
should be put on record.'
Turner's word, halting in expression, upon many great painters,
together with his own aesthetic searchings, may be found, as the reader
knows, in the _Inventory._ In the 'Tabley' Sketch-Book, dated 1808,
there is a long involved passage on reflections, beginning 'Reflections
not only appear darker but longer than the object which occasions them,
and if the ripple or hollow of the wave is long enough to make an angle
with the eye, it is on these undulating lines that the object reflects,
and transmits all perpendicular objects lower towards the spectator....'
Turner's 'Windmill and Lock' in the collection of Sir Frederick Cook at
Richmond is clearly based on a close study of Rembrandt's 'Mill.' Pages
17 and 19 of the 'Greenwich' Sketch-Book contain the following 'halting
in expression' notes:--
'... Rembrandt is a strong instance of caution as to reflected light
and Correggio (?) to refracted light. Two instances of the strongest
class may be found in the celebrated pictures of the Mill and La
Notte. The Mill has but one light, that is to say, upon the mill, for
the sky altho' a greater body or mass if reduced to black and white
yet is not perceptible of sun's ray by any indication of form, but
rather a glow of approaching light, but the sails of the mill are
loaded with the ... ray, while all below is lost in ... gloom without
the value of Reflected light which even the sky commands, and the ray
upon the mill insists upon, while the 1/2 gleam upon the water admits
the reflection of the sky. Ev ... twilight is all reflection but in
Rembrandt it is all darkness and gleam of light, etc'.
I turn with relief from Turner on Perspective and Reflected Light to
the thought of his pretty country retreat at West End, Upper Mall,
Hammersmith, whither he went, it is said, to be near de Loutherbourg,
'whose imaginative genius he much admired.'
'A friend' communicated to Thornbury the following glimpse of the life
at Hammersmith:--
'The garden, which ran down to the river, terminated in a summer-house;
and here, out in the open air, were painted some of his best pictures.
It was there that my father, who then resided at Kew, became first
acquainted with him; and expressing his surprise that Turner could
paint under such circumstances, he remarked that lights and room were
absurdities, and that a picture could be painted anywhere. His eyes
were remarkably strong. He would throw down his water-colour drawings
on the floor of the summer-house, requesting my father not to touch
them, as he could see them there, and they would be drying at the same
time.'
In that happy mood no doubt he painted the seventeen 'beginnings' of
pictures, exhibited for the first time in 1910 in Room XI. of the new
Turner Gallery--large beginnings of riparian and rural scenes, free
and decorative, that he no doubt exhibited in his own studio, inviting
patrons to commission 'finished' pictures from these delightful
suggestions.
He spent happy days making them, and in the garden at Hammersmith,
but it is probable that the important event of 1808 to Turner, ever
ambitious, ever reaching forward, ever clutching at fame, was the
privilege of writing the letters P.P. after his name.
CHAPTER XVI
1809: AGED THIRTY-FOUR
HE EXHIBITS THE GLOWING 'RIVER SCENE WITH CATTLE,' AND REFUSES TO SELL
'BLIGH SAND'
Turner was an experimentalist, a seeker. If we did not possess the
actual dates when most of his pictures were painted or exhibited, it
would be difficult to assign a year to many. Some are a recurrent
surprise and joy, standing out from their period, swift interpretations
of something seen in nature, evocations of colour or decorative
harmony. Consider his 'River Scene with Cattle' exhibited in his studio
in 1809. For a long time it hung apart from the other Turners at the
Tate Gallery, and it was always with a feeling of exhilaration that I
encountered the russet cattle standing by this golden river, golden
clouds and golden sand, and the two sailing barges gliding down the
wide estuary to the sea. The work is harmonious; nothing in it offends.
The children wading and playing on the shore are natural; the cattle
seen against the sky 'happen' as beasts do in nature, and the whole
picture lies bathed in a rich glow.
Equally pleasant to look upon is 'Bligh Sand,' beautiful still, but
what must it have been in its first freshness? It was becoming darker
in Thornbury's time, which he ascribes to Turner's use of the dangerous
sugar of lead. Although painted in 1809 'Bligh Sand' was not exhibited
at the Royal Academy until 1815. Sir George Beaumont wished to buy it
from the studio, but Turner, having a grudge against Constable's patron
for his lack of early appreciation of his works, refused to sell 'Bligh
Sand near Sheerness.' Years later, when the Turner Gallery in Queen
Anne Street fell into disorder and untidiness, this beautiful picture
was placed in front of a broken window and used as a draught protector.
The Turnerian cats were able to squeeze past it as they passed to and
from the studio.
'London from Greenwich,' a quiet, meditative Turner, was also painted
in 1809, and 'Spithead: Boat's Crew Recovering an Anchor,' also the
little panel called 'The Garreteer's Petition.' As nobody ever looks
at this stupid little picture, I may remark that it represents a poet
working in his attic at midnight, that on the walls of the attic are
pasted a plan of Parnassus and a table of fasts, and that the catalogue
contained these lines, manifestly Turner's, with the words 'long
sought' italicised, pathetically sincere coming from Turner:--
'Aid me, ye powers? O bid my thoughts to roll
In quick succession, animate my soul;
Descend my Muse, and every thought refine,
And finish well my long, my _long sought_ line.'
To this year belongs one of the 'Petworth' Sketch-Books with views of
the house and the park where he was to spend so many happy days. At
Petworth House and at Farnley Hall he was always welcome, and they are
still places of pilgrimage for Turnerians eager to see works which have
never left the walls for which they were painted.
Farnley Hall has been called Turner's shrine. Two of the modern
rooms are consecrated to him. 'One,' says Sir Walter Armstrong, 'is
hung round with drawings; in the other, three great oil-pictures
"Dordrecht," "Rembrandt's Daughter," and an unnamed "Sea Piece"
decorate the walls, while the tables groan under albums and solander
cases fitted with smaller things, and those studies of birds which so
moved the soul of Ruskin.'
1809 is also memorable as being the initial year of what Ruskin called
his 'Yorkshire period,' which continued with various developments
until about 1820. Ruskin, in his beautiful prose, describes the
characteristics of the Yorkshire drawings:--
'Of all his drawings, I think those of the Yorkshire series have the
most heart in them, the most affectionate, simple, unwearied serious
finishings of truth. There is in them little seeking after effect,
but a strong love of place; little exhibition of the artist's own
powers or peculiarities, but intense appreciation of the smallest
local minutiæ.... No alpine cloud could efface, no Italian sunshine
outshine the memories of the pleasant days of Rokeby and Bolton; and
many a simple promontory dim with southern olive, many a lone cliff
that stooped unnoticed over some alien wave, was recorded by him with
a love and delicate care that were the shadows of old thoughts and
long-lost delights, whose charm yet hung like morning mist above the
chanting waves of Wharfe and Greta.'
What was Turner like in appearance and dress about this period? Well,
the following description has been preserved:--
'The very moral of a master carpenter, with lobster-red face,
twinkling staring grey eyes, white tie, blue coat with brass buttons,
crab-shell turned up boots, large fluffy hat and enormous umbrella.'
A somewhat rough and rude description. His manners could be rude and
rough, too. A year or two later, Thomson of Duddingston invited him to
see his pictures. Turner came, and his companion was eager to hear what
the great landscape painter would say about his works. He surveyed them
carefully, but the only remark he made was: 'You beat me in frames.'
CHAPTER XVII
1810: AGED THIRTY-FIVE
A QUIET YEAR AND AN EARLY GOLDEN VISION
Enter an early golden vision.
The title in the catalogue is 'A Mountain Stream' and the official
description runs: 'The torrent winds swiftly round the base of a
rocky cliff surmounted by trees, and lashes itself into foam here and
there as it flows over boulders in the river bed.' I know not where
this attractive but somewhat hard golden vision was painted, but its
date is certainly about 1810. What a simplification of vision and of
title after such a medley as 'The Goddess of Discord choosing the
Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides'; how reposeful is
this unsophisticated statement of the seeing eye after the piled up
incidents of 'Calais Pier.'
It would seem that Turner was in a reflective peace-with-the-world mood
in this year, as indeed he had been since he painted the seventeen
large 'beginnings' of riparian and rural oil-pictures mentioned in
Chapter XV. To 1810 we may ascribe the placid 'Windsor' and the
pastoral 'Abingdon' which was sold to Mr. G. Hibbert, and re-purchased
by Turner at the Hibbert sale in 1829. It must have been an interesting
sight to watch Turner re-purchasing his sold pictures, and taking them
back to his cheerless gallery. In later years he owned three houses,
two in Harley Street and one in Queen Anne Street, communicating
mysteriously at the back, and leaving the corner building in other
hands. The houses are now pulled down, and the tablet commemorating his
residence is affixed to the new building of the Howard de Walden estate
office in Queen Anne Street. It may have been about this period that
Mrs. R---- and Mrs. H---- paid Turner the visit, an account of which
was communicated to Thornbury by Mr. Rose of Jersey:--
'Two ladies, Mrs. R---- and Mrs. H---- once paid him a visit in Harley
Street, an extremely rare (in fact, if not the only) occasion of
such an occurrence, for it must be known he was not fond of parties
prying, as he fancied, into the secrets of his _ménage._ On sending
in their names, after having ascertained that he was at home, they
were politely requested to walk in, and were shown into a large
sitting-room without a fire. This was in the depth of winter; and
lying about in various places were several cats without tails. In
a short time our talented friend made his appearance, asking the
ladies if they felt cold. The youngest replied in the negative; her
companion, more curious, wished she had stated otherwise, as she hoped
they might have been shown into his sanctum or studio. After a little
conversation he offered them wine and biscuits, which they partook
of for the novelty, such an event being almost unprecedented in his
house. One of the ladies bestowing some notice upon the cats, he was
induced to remark that he had seven, and that they came from the Isle
of Man.'
The Wreck of the _Minotaur_ on the Haak Sands' was a subject after his
own heart. I have not seen this sea-piece, which Mr. Wyllie describes
as the most 'splendid sea-picture that has ever been painted; the power
of the waves and the littleness of man have never been so magnificently
suggested.' That is high praise for a Turnerian sea-picture by a modern
painter of the sea.
Yes, a quiet year this seems to have been for Turner, marked by the
repose of the 'Abingdon' and the 'Windsor,' the stately pictures of
'Lowther Castle' at noon and evening, 'Petworth House, Dewy Morning,'
and that golden dream called 'A Mountain Stream,' to which probably
he gave no title, a little hard, a little tight, but an augury of the
subtle effects of light and vapour that were to float from his brush
when the chief had advanced to a complete realisation of his vision of
essential beauty.
PART FOUR
1811-1820
FROM A JOURNEY TO DEVONSHIRE TO HIS RETURN FROM ITALY
CHAPTER XVIII
1811: AGED THIRTY-SIX
'APOLLO KILLING THE PYTHON' AND A PICNIC
'The Python was a dragon which lived at Crissa, in the vicinity of
Delphi, and committed great havoc among cattle and the inhabitants. The
Pythian games there celebrated were established in commemoration of the
destruction of the Python by Apollo.' So runs the official description
in the catalogue appended to 'Apollo Killing the Python.' When it
was exhibited in 1811, Turner supplied six lines from the _Hymn of
Callimachus._ beginning:--
'Envenora'd by thy darts, the monster coil'd,
Portentous, horrible, and vast his snake-like form....'
'Mercury and Herse' was illumined by this couplet from
Ovid's _Metamorphoses_:--
'Close by the sacred walls in wide Munichio's plain,
The God well pleased beheld the virgin train!'
How tiresome these descriptions and tags of verse seem, and how
old-fashioned 'Apollo Killing the Python' looks, yet I have only to
gaze at it for five minutes to be hypnotised by its grandeur; but the
mood passes, and Ruskin's panegyric does not restore it, that succinct
panegyric--'This is one of the very noblest of all Turner's works, and
therefore I do not scruple to say, one of the noblest pictures in the
world.'
The pages of _Modern Painters_ roll on in magnificent and eloquent
periods on 'Apollo Killing the Python.' Certain of the passages one
knows by heart, few of them have anything to do with the art of Turner,
and some are untrue, such as--'He was without hope'; 'Turner painted
the labour of men, their sorrow and their death.' Often Ruskin's prose
leaves us breathless, almost crushed:--
'Fancy him [the dragon] moving, and the roaring of the ground under
his rings; the grinding down of the rocks by his toothed whorls;
the skeleton glacier of him in thunderous march, and the ashes of
the hills rising round him like smoke, and encompassing him like a
curtain.'
The quotation from Ovid and the theme of 'Apollo Killing the Python'
suggest that Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ was one of the few books that
Turner really studied and read through, probably again and again, as he
found most of his subjects for classical pictures in Ovid. Monkhouse
considers that with the exception of 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus,'
there is none greater than the 'Apollo Killing the Python.' That must
remain a matter of opinion. To me it seems that Ovid only confused
Turner's imagination. He needed no classical legend to paint such
masterpieces as 'Norham Castle at Sunrise,' 'The Evening Star,' 'The
Burial of Wilkie,' 'Rain, Steam and Speed,' 'The Snowstorm,' or the
later interpretations of Venice.
Let us turn from books, even from the classic _Metamorphoses_, to
nature, to Devonshire, where in this year, or thereabouts, Cyrus
Redding met him, to whom we owe delightful accounts of Turner in
holiday mood.
On one of these excursions Turner once actually gave a picnic 'in
excellent taste.' 'Our host,' says Redding, was 'agreeable but terse,
blunt, and almost epigrammatic at times. Never given to waste his
words, nor remarkably choice in their arrangement, they were always
in their right place and admirably effective.' An account has also
been preserved of a scene in an inn where they conversed until nearly
midnight, when Turner laid his head upon the table and was soon sound
asleep. They were up with the sun, and it was at that early hour that
Turner made his sketch for 'Crossing the Brook' exhibited in 1815.
Another excursion was by sea. The morning was squally, and the sea
rolled boisterously into the sound. Then they landed and--
'Turner was all the while quiet, watching the troubled scene, and it
was not unworthy his notice. The island, the solitary hut upon it, the
bay in the bight of which it lay, and the long gloomy Bolt Head to
seaward, against which the waves broke with fury, seemed to absorb the
entire notice of the artist, who scarcely spoke a syllable. While the
fish were getting ready, Turner mounted nearly to the highest point of
the island rock, _and seemed writing rather than drawing._ The wind
was almost too violent for either purpose; what he particularly noted
he did not say.'
And here is a specimen of Turner's conversation, showing how true was
his observation:--
'He was looking at a seventy-four gun ship, which lay in the shadow
under Saltash. The ship seemed one dark mass.
'"I told you that would be the effect," said Turner, referring to some
previous conversation. "Now, as you observe, it is all shade."
'"Yes, I perceive it; and yet the ports are there." '"We can only take
what is visible--no matter what may be there. There are people in the
ship; we don't see them through the planks."'
Turner's friends could have told Ruskin how untrue was such a statement
as 'he was without hope.' Like ordinary mortals he had his good days
and his bad days, his hours of fun and his hours of gloom, his moments
of kindness and his moments of cruelty.
'His spirits,' says Thornbury, 'were high, deep as were occasionally
his fits of melancholy.' Once he wrote a letter to Calcott, in which
he drew a wild duck or mallard, a pun on his second name; and as to
his kindness, there is the story, one of many, of his generosity at
the 1811 Academy to a young artist called Bird, whose picture had
been crowded out. Turner begged the Hanging Committee to restore the
work, insisting that it was too good to be rejected. They agreed,
but declined to alter the hanging. Turner had another long look at
Bird's picture, and then, taking down one of his own of the same size,
hung Bird's in its place. I wonder was that 'one of his own' the
'Scarborough,' exhibited this year, the large, beautiful, and simple
sketch for which is in the National Collection, one of the 'unfinished'
water-colours reproduced in these pages.
We begin to understand something of Turner the man as well as of Turner
the artist. As an artist he seems the more wonderful, the more one
studies him. To-day I looked again at his 'Innsbruck,' his 'Sketch of
an Italian Town,' and his 'Lake of Brienz' at the Victoria and Albert
Museum. Those three water-colours, stages in his development, are
sufficient to make an ordinary painter's reputation.
CHAPTER XIX
1812: AGED THIRTY-SEVEN
HE EXHIBITS 'HANNIBAL CROSSING THE ALPS,' SUGGESTED BY A SNOWSTORM HE
HAD SEEN AT FARNLEY
In one of the Sketch-Books for this year labelled 'Sandycombe
and Yorkshire' are the following, on the same page, in Turner's
handwriting. We can imagine the reasons why he composed the tortuous
passage on Salvator's 'powers of rapidity.' Did he, I wonder, buy the
mattress?
'Salvator Rosa painted a picture for the Constable of France in a day,
and carried it home, which rapidity so captivated the Constable that
he ordered another large one, which he likewise began, finished and
sent home, that (?) well paid for by purses of gold and as Constable
commented which would be first weary, but upon the production of the
fifth the employer sent two purses and declined rivalship with the
artist's powers of rapidity.
Candles 1
Trout 2
Pillow 16
Mattress 1. 11. 6.
The next Sketch-Book is short, and devoted to Farnley. The idea of the
'Snowstorm, Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps,' came to Turner
through a storm he saw at Farnley.
One wild day Turner called loudly from the doorway:--
'Hawkey! Hawkey! come here! Look at this thunderstorm--isn't it
wonderful? Isn't it sublime?'
And while he talked he was making notes of its form and colour on the
back of a letter. Young Mr. Hawkes proposed a drawing block but Turner
said the letter did very well. He was absorbed, entranced, while the
storm rolled and swept, and the lightning flashed over the Yorkshire
hills. When the storm had passed Turner returned to the room and said:--
'There, Hawkey. In two years you will see this again, and call it
"Hannibal Crossing the Alps."'
We look at this tumultuous picture to-day and think of that
thunderstorm at Farnley as we watch the lurid sun through the storm of
snow that threatens to overwhelm the muddled, huddled, Carthaginian
army. Yes: it is wonderful as was the thunderstorm to Turner. This
picture, in a category between his classical works and his sunlight
visions, was accompanied by nine halting, unpoetical lines from the
_Fallacies of Hope_, this being the first time that a quotation from
that poem was attached to the R. A. catalogues. The title was modified,
probably, from Campbell's _Pleasures of Hope._
'Craft, treachery, and fraud--Salassian force--
Hung on the fainting rear; then plunder seized
The victor and the captive,--Saguntum's spoil
Alike became their prey; still the chief advanc'd,
Looked on the sun with hope; low, broad, and wan
While the fierce archer of the downward year
Stains Italy's blanched barrier with storms.
In vain each pass, ensanguined deep with dead
Or rocky fragments, wide destruction roll'd.'
And the eyes fall upon two lines that mean something, that aptly
express the thought of the dumb poet, the lines which I quoted in
Chapter III.,--'Still the chief advanced, Looked on the sun with
hope'--Turner's fitting epitaph, and life-long aspiration. He added to
the _Fallacies of Hope_ off and on for forty years, and it dealt with
almost every conceivable subject from the Deluge to Napoleon.
This year his town address is given as Queen Anne Street West, but, as
I have already explained, this did not mean a change of domicile, as
the three houses, two in Harley Street and one in Queen Anne Street,
were the same dwelling with a communication at the back.
Turner, Thornbury tells us, almost entirely rebuilt his house in Queen
Anne Street, and while all the houses round it from time to time
smartened themselves up, this alone remained unchanged. The Gallery in
later years, as we know, became most dilapidated:--
The oiled paper of the skylight hung down in black, sooty, furred
slips. The damp here and there had free access; and it is certain that
while many of the pictures ripened and improved, others were cracked,
warped, chilled, and seriously injured. Both the "Hero and Leander,"
and "The Building of Carthage," suffered. Mr. E. Godall tells me that
in one picture particularly, a great white button of paint that had
stood for the sun had dropped off.
'"I think some one has picked it off intentionally," he could not help
saying.
'"I think he has," replied Turner, quite unmoved.'
Turner was 'quite unmoved.' As he grew older he cared less and less for
the things that most people deem so important. His golden visions did
not depend upon material accessories. May we not find a hint of his
almost inarticulate inner life in that little red book unearthed by
Thornbury from his studio, where, amid notes about chemistry, memoranda
as to colours, and prophylactics against the Maltese plague, are
certain scraps of verse, something about 'Anna's Kiss,' 'A Look Back,'
'A Toilsome Dream,' 'Human Joy, Ecstasy, and Hope'?
But I am anticipating. We are still in the year 1812 and Turner is
preparing 'A Frosty Morning' for exhibition, and considering one of
his earliest series of book illustrations,--_The Southern Coast of
England_, which was probably begun about 1812, although the first seven
plates, including 'St. Michael's Mount,' 'Poole,' and 'Land's End,'
were not published until 1814. The last issue was in 1826. De Wint,
Clennell and Prout were also contributors to _The Southern Coast._
Turner was to receive seven and a half guineas apiece for the drawings,
which was increased later to ten and twelve guineas. But in spite of
that advance he became dissatisfied and broke with W. B. Cooke, the
line engraver and publisher of _The Southern Coast._ Business relations
with Turner were not easy.
CHAPTER XX
1813: AGED THIRTY-EIGHT
HOAR FROST AT SUNRISE THAT HAS VANISHED FROM 'A FROSTY MORNING'
Turner was anxious about his health this year, if we may judge from an
entry in the 'Chemistry and Apuleia' Sketch-Book detailing the symptoms
of the Maltese plague, and the cure. A 'receipt for covering Linen to
make it impenetrable to water, etc.,' follows, then 'Study of Sky,'
'River with Hills on Either Side,' notes as to varnishes and sketches
of nymphs dancing, showing that his anxiety about the symptoms of the
Maltese plague had passed away.
In this year he exhibited the attractive and popular 'A Frosty Morning:
Sunrise,' with a quotation from Thomson's _Seasons_: 'The rigid
hoar-frost melts before his beam'; also 'The Deluge' with some lines
from _Paradise Lost_:--
'... down rush'd the rain
Impetuous, and continued till the earth
No more was seen.'
These subjects indicate Turner's versatility and determination to
impress the public with one thing, if not with another. 'A Frosty
Morning: Sunrise' is infinitely nearer to the real Turner than 'The
Deluge.' It is a pleasant picture, simple and direct, a true transcript
of nature; but where is the hoar-frost which made such a sensation
when the picture was exhibited? It is gone like the bloom on the
Impressionist pictures in the Caillebotte Collection in the Luxembourg
Gallery. The form of 'A Frosty Morning' remains, and it still suggests
the chill of a winter sunrise, but gone is the sparkling hoar-frost.
Archdeacon Fisher writing to Constable about one of his landscapes
said: 'I have heard your great picture spoken of here by no inferior
judge as one of the best in the Exhibition. I only like one better and
that is a picture of pictures, the 'Frost' by Turner. But then you need
not repine at this decision of mine; you are a great man and, like
Bonaparte, are only to be beaten by a frost.'
That is something; to have one's Academy contribution described
as 'a picture of pictures,' and by one whose allegiance was given
whole-heartedly to a rival painter. It would be interesting to
know what Constable thought of Turner's 'Frosty Morning: Sunrise.'
Already you perceive that Turner is forsaking his rivalries, and
'finding himself with nothing between his vision and a Sunrise.
There is a personal note in this picture. The horses were studied
from the friendly steed 'Crop-ear,' somewhat stiff in the fore-legs,
which Turner used to drive about the country when he was staying at
Sandycombe. The young Trimmers said that Turner painted faster than he
drove, and Thornbury remarked that he could never draw a horse; but
I am sure that he could paint a hoar-frost at sunrise. And if this
picture had been happily rolled up and kept in the cellars of the
National Gallery with the other sunrise pictures, we might to-day still
be enjoying Turner's sparkling vision of hoar-frost.
CHAPTER XXI
1814. AGED THIRTY-NINE
HE PAINTS MORE CLASSICAL PICTURES, TURNS AUTHOR, AND IS HAPPY AT
SANDYCOMBE
More classical pictures with the annoying foregrounds, the dream
buildings reflected in the still water, and the beauty of the Turnerian
distance. You can take your choice between 'Dido and Æneas leaving
Carthage on the Morning of the Chase,' and 'Apuleia in search of
Apuleius,' which won the premium at the British Institution for the
best landscape of the year. Unblushingly Turner founded it on one of
Claude's sketches in his _Liber Veritatis._ Although he set himself to
rival Claude before all the world, sure of his own victory, he had not
the slightest hesitation in basing his prize picture on a sketch by
Claude.
But there is nothing classical or imitative about his 'Review at
Portsmouth' Sketch-Book of this year with its innumerable sketches of
shipping, and its usual stumbling scraps of verse such as--
'The floating bulwark lies
Above (?) the holy cross unfurled (?)
Blowing ... shows the saviour of the world
Hence gloomy evil infamy's.'
In 1814, as I have said in Chapter XIX., the first seven parts of _The
Southern Coast_ were published, and in this year Turner appears as an
author with ill-success. He had attempted to describe 'St. Michael's
Mount' for _The Southern Coast_, and Combe, the editor to whom Turner's
description had been sent, writes thus to Cooke, the publisher:--
_Friday afternoon._
My Dear Sir,--I am really concerned to be obliged to say that Mr.
T----'s account is the most extraordinary composition I have ever
read. It is impossible for me to correct it, for in some parts I do
not understand it. The punctuation is everywhere defective, and here
I have done what I could, and have sent the proof to Mr. Bulmer.
I think the revise should be sent to Mr. T----, to request his
attention to the whole, and particularly the part that I have marked
as unintelligible. In my private opinion, it is scarcely an admissible
article in its present state; but as he has signed his name to it, he
will be liable to the sole blame for its imperfections.--Your faithful
humble servant, W. C.'
Cooke suppressed Turner's composition; but Combe, evidently knowing his
man, told Cooke that unless he wished to drive Turner 'stark staring
mad' he must be sure to send him corrected sheets of the suppressed
article. The end was that Turner's contribution was cancelled. In
1827 all connection between Cooke and Turner was broken off. Turner
was clearly in the wrong. How could anybody work with this genius?
'His mind,' says Hamerton, 'was subject to confused changes and
irregularities about all transactions, owing to its want of method and
clearness.' The Freemasons' Hall affair between Turner and Cooke must
have been amusing to some, painful to others. 'It was,' says Thornbury,
'a dispute about the return of some drawings (I think of the _Annual
Tour_) that both claimed. Turner's red face grew white with the depth
of his rage, Cooke grew hot and red, and "must," "shan't," "shall,"
"rogue" flew about.'
In this year Turner bought Solus Lodge, later called Sandycombe Lodge,
on the road between Twickenham and Isleworth. There his old father used
to dig in the garden, and look after the household, and there Turner
spent probably some of the happiest days of his life. He was friendly
with the Trimmer family of Heston, four miles off, and the Vicar, the
Rev. Henry Scott Trimmer, tried to teach Turner Greek in return for
lessons in painting, but he could never overcome the difficulty of the
verbs, and finally had to renounce the attempt. 'I fear I must give
it up, Trimmer,' he said; 'you get on better with your painting than
I with my Greek.' The young Trimmers, who were living when Thornbury
wrote his _Life of Turner_, describe him as a slovenly old man (he was
still far off fifty), very sociable and wont to make them laugh. The
days must have passed pleasantly at Sandycombe, sketching in oils on
a large canvas in a boat, painting in the summer-house of the garden
which ran down to the Thames, fishing, and driving old 'Crop-ear'
about the country. The young Trimmers give a much pleasanter picture
of Turner than most of his friends and contemporaries, but then they
loved him. They describe Queen Anne Street as homely, and say that
when they visited him they were always welcome to what he had, and
that he would offer them cake and wine, and stuff the cake into their
pockets. And they show Turner in modest mood before the work of other
painters, telling how he spoke with rapture of a picture probably by
Poussin, 'Jonah cast on Shore,' describing it as wonderful; and how he
was enthusiastic about Gainsborough's execution, and Wilson's tone. And
how, one day, looking at a Van de Velde, Turner said, 'I can't paint
like him.'
But he could. Van de Velde is to-day in the trough of his own dark
seas, and Turner is on the crest of his own opalescent waves beneath a
sky flushed with his dreams of colour.
CHAPTER XXII
1815: AGED FORTY
'A WONDERFUL YEAR' AND A TURNERIAN LOVE-LETTER
Eighteen hundred and fifteen was a wonderful year in the history of
Europe, and it has also been called a wonderful year in the art history
of Turner. He sent eight pictures to the Royal Academy, and among them
were 'Crossing the Brook,' 'Dido Building Carthage, or the Rise of the
Carthaginian Empire,' and 'Bligh Sand near Sheerness.' Some consider
'Crossing the Brook' as the finest Turner, others regard it as rather
old-fashioned with its conventional trees and domestic foreground, but
all like its English character, the cool beauty of the colour, the
white clouds that curl in the grey-blue sky, the wooded hills that
rise from the Tamar, dividing Devon and Cornwall, and the miles of
faint, fair, distant country. 'Crossing the Brook' was a favourite of
Turner's, and so was the magnificent 'Dido Building Carthage.' This
classical triumph, a shout of colour, with 'The Sun Rising Through
Vapour' flank the two Claudes in the National Gallery, Turner's message
of rivalry from the grave. In life he would not part with 'Dido
Building Carthage.' Chantrey tried to buy the picture more than once,
but found the price rose higher each time.
'Why, what in the world, Turner, are you going to do with the picture?'
he asked.
'Be buried in it, to be sure,' growled Turner.
This year, too, we have the record of what has been described as
Turner's second attempt at marriage, which I do not think amounts to
much more than his first love-affair. At the end of the following
letter will be found the offer of marriage; the lady in question was a
relation of the Trimmers:--
Queen Anne Street, Tuesday, _August 1st,_ 1815.
'My Dear Sir,--I lament that all hope of the pleasure of seeing you or
getting to Heston must for the present probably vanish. My father told
me on Saturday last when I was as usual compelled to return to town
the same day, that you and Mrs. Trimmer would leave Heston for Suffolk
as to-morrow, Wednesday. In the first place I am glad to hear that her
health is so far established as to be equal to the journey, and to
give me your utmost hope for her benefiting by the sea air being fully
realised, 'twill give me great pleasure to hear, and the earlier the
better.
'After next Tuesday, if you have a moment's time to spare, a line
will reach me at Farnley Hall, near Otley, Yorkshire, and for some
time, as Mr. Fawkes talks of keeping me in the north by a trip to
the Lakes, and until November; therefore I suspect I am not to see
Sandycombe. Sandycombe sounds just now in my ears as an act of folly
when I reflect how little I have been able to be there this year and
less chance perhaps for the next. In looking forward to a continental
excursion, and poor Daddy seems as much plagued with weeds as I am
with disappointment--that if Miss----would but waive bashfulness, or
in other words make an offer instead of expecting one, the same might
change occupiers; but not to trouble you further allow me with most
sincere respect to Mrs. Trimmer and family, to consider myself.--Yours
most truly obliged,
'J. M. W. Turner.'
The reference to Miss----does not suggest the heart of a burning lover:
no, Turner's heart was in his work, and also, just now, in the prospect
of a 'continental excursion.'
CHAPTER XXIII
1816: AGED FORTY-ONE
SKIES! SKIES! SKIES!
The Sketch-Books of the period are full of Yorkshire and Farnley
subjects, and one of them contains a fragment of a letter from Mr.
Walter Fawkes concluding: 'Everybody is delighted with your "Mill." I
sit for a long time before it every day.' The 'Mill' which delighted
Mr. Fawkes may be the 'View of Otley Mills with the River Wharfe and
Mill Weir,' sold at Christie's in 1890.
I do not suppose that anybody has ever sat for a long time every day,
or any day, before Turner's two contributions to the Academy of this
year, 'The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius Restored,' and the 'View of
the Temple of Jupiter Panellenius.' I turn from them to the Sketch-Book
labelled simply 'Skies.' Inside one of the covers there is a sketch in
pencil of a sky with the following in Turner's handwriting: 'Yellow
Light. Blue Shadows. Red Crimson Light.' Following this there are sixty
leaves and on each leaf is a study of a sky. How far they seem removed
from the Temple of Jupiter Panellenius. Skies! Skies! Skies! And on the
last leaf of this sketch-book is a pencil drawing showing 'An Interior
with open doors leading to a garden,' as if, in this year of sky
watching, he must, even when within doors, be looking out towards the
light.
CHAPTER XXIV
1817: AGED FORTY-TWO
HE SELLS FIFTY WATER-COLOURS TO MR. FAWKES OF FARNLEY HALL
The 'Rhine Tour' Sketch-Book of 1817 suggests that Turner was in the
mood to be careful about his material necessities, one can hardly call
them comforts. Written inside the covers are the words:--
'Boots, Pouch, Fever Medicine, Bark, Pencils, Colours,' followed by,
'_Vier ist myn Simmer_--Where is my chamber?' On a later page I find
the following list:--
'3 Shirts, 1 Night ditto, A Razor, a Ferrell for Umbrella, a Pair of
Stockings, a waistcoat, 1/2 dozen of Pencils, 6 Cravats, 1 large ditto,
1 Box of Colours'--and then, on the next leaf, the inevitable 'Study of
a Sky.'
On a page of the 'Dort' Sketch-Book is this note of a 'thing seen' that
he may have thought of painting:--
'Float of Timber--1000 feet long at least, lashed into two pieces and
guided by the cross piece of timber which hauls either part of the
float or buoy in two lines--and drawn by 3 Horses down the Canal.'
During this three weeks' tour in the Rhine district Turner produced no
fewer than fifty drawings at the rate of about three a day. He first,
says Mr. Rawlinson, stained the paper a uniform bluish-grey, which,
although itself sombre in tone, effectively shows up the body-colour
work, and must have effected an immense economy of time as compared
with ordinary transparent colour. Returning to England he took the roll
of drawings straight to Farnley Hall, and Mr. Fawkes bought them for
five hundred pounds. For a long time they remained in a portfolio, but
a few years ago some of them were sold at Christie's. Mr. Rawlinson
possesses one of them, the delicate and romantic 'Goarhausen and Katz
Castle.'
Other drawings of this period are the rich and forceful 'Bonneville,
Savoy' in the Salting collection at the British Museum, a majestic
water-colour; that vision of yellow foliage, blue water, and
outstretched yellowy-blue country, 'The Lake of Nemi,' and the more
academic 'Turin from the Church of the Superga,' the foreground with
its artless groups not very attractive, but the distant glimpse of the
snow mountains, and the white fleecy clouds seen against the blue sky,
as lovely as Turner could make them,' and that is saying much.
Probably in this year he began the glorious illustrations to Dr.
Whitaker's _History of Richmondshire_, which contains some of his
finest water-colours. The first plate was published in 1819, the
last in 1822. Turner was paid twenty-five guineas a drawing, and
the magnificent enterprise cost the publishers, Messrs Longman, ten
thousand pounds. 'The Crook of the Lune' is one of the finest of the
series. 'You can find at least twenty different walks in it--yet all
this wealth of exquisite detail is perfectly subordinated to the
unity and harmony of the composition as a whole.' Another of the
Richmondshire drawings is the 'Hornby Castle' in the Victoria and
Albert Museum, which, through constant exposure to light, is a wreck of
its former beauty.
His chief Royal Academy picture of 1817 was 'The Decline of the
Carthaginian Empire.' It has disappeared from the National Gallery,
loaned, I suppose, to some provincial museum, where a Turner, even a
bad Turner, is a Turner. I will quote from the catalogue of 1817 its
full title, and tag of verse by Turner, and say no more about 'The
Decline of the Carthaginian Empire.'
'EXHIBITION XLIX 1817
'J. M. W. Turner, R.A. Professor of Perspective, Sandycombe Lodge,
Twickenham, and Queen Anne Street West.
'The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire. Rome, being determined on the
overthrow of her hated rival, demanded from her such terms as might
either force her into war, or ruin her by compliance; the enervated
Carthaginians, in their anxiety for peace, consented to give up even
their arms and their children.
"At Hope's delusive smile,
The Chieftain's safety and the mother's pride,
Were to the insidious conqueror's grasp resign'd;
While o'er the western wave th' ensanguined sun,
In gathering haze, a stormy signal spread,
And set portentous."'
Behold a mystery! The eyes that saw and the hand that produced the
simple splendour of 'Richmond Castle,' and the spacious beauty of 'The
Crook of the Lune' could also see in fancy and produce in reality 'The
Decline of the Carthaginian Empire.'
CHAPTER XXV
1818: AGED FORTY-THREE
'THE ABBOTSFORD TURNERS,' AND AN AUCTION PRICE OF A TURNER WATER-COLOUR
'The Field of Waterloo,' exhibited in 1818, with its obvious quotation
from Byron, is as dead as rider and horse, friend and foe piled in the
foreground. It now hangs on the outer stair-case of the new Turner
Gallery, as if in disgrace.
Turner journeyed north this year to make drawings for the _Provincial
Antiquities of Scotland_, for which Sir Walter Scott was gratuitously
writing the letterpress. He did not meet Scott on this occasion,
but the artist and author met in 1831, when Turner was illustrating
Cadell's edition of _Scott's Poetical and Prose Works._ The _Provincial
Antiquities_ drawings, which include the important 'Edinburgh from the
Calton Hill,' were afterwards presented by the publishers to Sir Walter
in recognition of his aid in the production of the book. For a long
time they hung at Abbotsford, and the group was known by the honoured
name of the 'Abbotsford Turners.' They are now scattered.
It would take a lifetime to follow the vicissitudes of all Turner's
water-colours, when they were painted, and where they are to-day.
The 'Heysham' of this year, with the elaborate lovely sky, is in the
Salting Collection at the British Museum. To the 'Heysham' Ruskin
devoted half a dozen pages in his _Elements of Drawing._
Turner's water-colours are constantly changing hands. The gleaming eyes
of the wizard, that some called covetous, would indeed have looked
covetous could he have known that, in the twentieth century, a fine
water-colour of his best period, for which he received a few guineas,
may realise two thousand pounds.
'What do you think the Turner "Lake of Lucerne" will fetch?' said a
Turner collector to me the day before an auction in June 1910. 'Oh, two
thousand pounds,' I answered.
'Absurd!' he cried. It brought one thousand nine hundred and
ninety-five pounds. I believe that there are certain men who would
rather possess a fine Turner water-colour than any other work of art.
CHAPTER XXVI
1819: AGED FORTY-FOUR
TURNER'S FIRST VISIT TO ITALY, AND AN EXHIBITION IN GROSVENOR PLACE
The route of Turner's memorable first visit to Italy may be followed
in detail in the Sketch-Books, between No. CLXXI., called the 'Route
to Rome,' and No. CXCII., devoted to the 'Return from Italy.' His
divagations and pauses are recorded on innumerable pages of sketches,
studies, comments, and criticisms of pictures. Here are his cursory
notes on a copy he made of a sea-piece by Claude:--
'Date 1631 or 81 Roma--he died at 82. Raf. 1512.'
'Wonderful grey green,' 'arm in light,' 'The mast Red--all painted at
once with the colour.'
We find him at Venice, Rimini, Ancona, Naples, Paestum, Pompeii and
Sorrento--anywhere, everywhere. Turn the pages. Here he is in the
Vatican with a Sketch-Book labelled 'Vatican Fragments' containing
such comments as 'Christ by Guercino beautifully color'd,' 'A Hare by
Albert Dürer,' and 'Annunciation. The Angel very elegant.' On the way
from Ancona to Rome his hand tries to transcribe what his watchful eyes
note:--
'Loretto to Recanata. Colour of the hills Wilson Claude, the olives
the light ..., when the sun shone green, the ground reddish green grey
and apt to Purple, the Sea quite Blue, under the Sun a warm vapour,
from the Sun Blue relieving (?) the shadow of the olive Trees dark,
while the foliage light on the whole when in the shadow a quiet grey.
Beautiful dark green yet warm, the middle Trees, yet Bluish in parts,
the distance; the aqueduct reddish, the foreground light grey in
shadow.'
But that visit to Italy, the magic and colour of it, the pictures he
saw, the sunrises and the sunsets he studied, appear to have affected
his art unfavourably for a time, to have disturbed him with florid and
fantastic fancies. It was as if he became intoxicated with the art and
aspect of Italy.
There is no hint of Italy in the works he exhibited this year. I can
stand for a long time before 'The Meuse, Orange Merchant-men going to
Pieces on the Bar,' lost in admiration of the wonderful sky, trying to
avoid looking at the foolish fishermen, and remembering a phrase I have
read somewhere that 'with this picture he gave the _coup de grâce_ to
Van de Velde.'
Another work of 1819 was the huge, neat and amusing view of 'England,
Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent's Birthday,' now hanging in a place
of honour in the new Turner Gallery. It dominates the wall, whereas in
its old place above the line in the National Gallery one hardly noticed
the Prince Regent's Birthday, with its quotation from Thomson:--
'Which way, Amanda, shall we bend our course?
The choice perplexes.'
'Richmond,' and 'Rome from the Vatican,' exhibited the following year,
are the largest pictures Turner painted.
In May and June, presumably after his return from Italy, Mr. Fawkes of
Farnley opened an exhibition of all the water-colours he possessed at
his house in Grosvenor Place. The first two rooms contained drawings
by Havell, Robson, Hedphy, Hills, Prout, Varley, Fielding, de Wint and
others; the third room was reserved to Turner. The exhibition was a
great success, and we are told that the public had an opportunity of
seeing Turner 'moving about the rooms, the principal figure in his own
triumph.' A contemporary critic seems, however, to have made up his
mind that Turner's visit, to Italy had done him temporarily no good. In
the _Annals of the Fine Arts_, of the year 1820, appeared the following
criticism of Turner's works in the exhibition held at Mr. Fawkes's
house in Grosvenor Place, which must have included some of the Italian
drawings:--
'Turner appears here in his original splendour and to his greatest
advantage. Those who only know the artist of late and from his
academical works will hardly believe the grandeur, simplicity and
beauty that pervade his best works in this collection.... The earlier
works of Turner before he visited Rome and those he has done since
for this collection are like works of a different artist. The former,
natural, simple and effective; the latter, artificial, glaring and
affected.'
Was the water-colour of the 'Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo,' made
in Rome in 1819, that now hangs, to our delight, in the new Turner
Gallery, one of the drawings shown at the exhibition in Grosvenor
Place? Hardly. For this beautiful drawing is 'natural, simple and
effective,' not 'artificial, glaring and affected.' Turner saw this
glowing church with his own eyes. Although in Italy, he was at home
with himself when he painted this quiet interlude, undisturbed by the
Roman art fever that heated and harassed his imagination.
A simpler simplicity, a purer and more mystical vision of colour was
eventually to come to him; but not yet. For the next few years the
Italianised Turner was to be finding his way, through the insistent
memories of Italy, to the real Turner.
CHAPTER XXVII
1820: AGED FORTY-FIVE
RETURN FROM ITALY: HE BEGINS TO SIGHT HIS MYSTICAL VISIONS
Visitors to the Royal Academy of 1820 saw that the great man had
been in Rome. How like Turner it was to call a picture 'Rome from
the Vatican: Raeffaelle, accompanied by La Fornarina, preparing his
pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia.' He loved to introduce a
painter whom he admired into a picture--Raphael, Rembrandt, Ruysdael,
Van Goyen, Watteau and the rest. This Raphael-Roman picture was one of
Turner's failures, and like other failures it is no longer exhibited
in the National Collection. What a contrast it is to such an essential
Turner as the atmospheric 'Lancaster Sands' in the Farnley Hall
collection, produced about this time. Another, a later version now in
the Salting Collection at the British Museum, showing the sun setting
behind the Cumberland Hills, and the stage coach, carts and figures
hurrying to escape the rising tide, was engraved for the _England and
Wales_ series and published in 1828.
Here we stand at a halting-place in Turner's career. He has trained
himself; he has fought his rivals, and, perhaps with the exception
of Claude, has beaten them all on their own ground. He has expressed
himself in the luminous atmosphere of 'The Sun Rising Through Vapour';
in the hoar-frost sparkle of 'The Frosty Morning'; in the cool blues
and greys of 'Crossing the Brook,' and in the splendour of 'Dido
Building Carthage.' In water-colour he has advanced from the formalism
of the early tinted drawings to the restrained beauty of the _Southern
Coast_ and the accomplishment of the _Richmondshire_ series. And he has
been to Italy: his eyes are dazzled. Colour is to be his master, but
after a few years he is to become almost impatient of local colour and
form, and to lose form and local colour in the radiance of suffused
light. He is to paint the aspect, not the object. I turn once more
to the _Inventory_ and under the rubric 1820 dealing with 'Colour
Beginnings,' find this comment by Mr. Finberg:--
'As a rule these studies are of a highly abstract character, _i.e._,
they deal only with the composition of fundamental colour masses--the
ground tones, as it were, of a picture, which in the final result
are largely concealed under the subsequent embroidery of secondary
incidents and motives.'
In these 'Colour Beginnings' 'projects for designs which may or may
not have been carried out,' Turner seems to be beginning to sight his
mystical visions. The very titles of some are eloquent 'Moonlight Among
Ruins,' 'Hulks on Tamar, Twilight,' 'The Rainbow,' 'Lighthouse against
a Stormy Sky.' Eloquent, too, are three slight water-colours, showing
only faint indications of the difference between sky and land.
PART FIVE
1821-1829
FROM 'THE BAY OF BALE' TO 'ULYSSES DERIDING POLYPHEMUS'
CHAPTER XXVIII
1822: AGED FORTY-SEVEN
HE THROWS OFF ANOTHER 'NORHAM CASTLE' AND PREPARES TO STARTLE THE WORLD
WITH 'THE BAY OF BAIÆ'
Turner sent nothing to the Royal Academy of 1821, and in 1822 he
exhibited only the unimportant 'What you Will,' a mere nothing, a
memory of some other painter. 'What you Will' was probably forgotten
except by its owner and students of Turner; but in 1910 it appeared at
Christie's and was described by an influential daily paper as a fine
early Turner 'depicting a party of ladies and gentlemen in a garden
near some groups of statuary.' It realised £1,176, an enormous rise
on the price, one hundred and fifty guineas, which Chantrey gave for
'What you Will.' He wrote the price on the back of the picture, so that
there might be no mistake. Turner would have been amazed to learn what
the twentieth century thought of this experiment of his in 'figured
landscape.' Perhaps the price it fetched answers a caustic comment
of Hazlitt's: 'Mr. Turner's pictures have not like Claude's become a
sentiment in the heart of Europe; his fame has not been stamped and
rendered sacred by the hand of time. Perhaps it never will.'
A Sketch-Book of this year is called 'King's Visit to Scotland.' On
leaf 58, _à propos_ of the reception of George IV., is this note in
Turner's handwriting: 'Custom House Key. The Authorities in Blue and
White Gowns. Red Flags and Gold.' According to Ruskin's endorsement on
the wrapper Turner went to Edinburgh by sea.
In the 'Medway' Sketch-Book of the previous year on a drawing
of 'Scenes on Medway' are these notes on Clouds in his own
handwriting:--'Cold,' 'Warm,' 'Yellow Clouds,' 'Rain with ... Colour
along its edge,' 'Rain in Shade.'
No labour either with pen or pencil was too arduous to hinder him
from noting down his impressions of the effects of nature from hour
to hour and day to day. And always every year there is some work that
starts out and affects us by its beauty. With this year I associate the
imposing 'Norham Castle' in the National Collection engraved for _River
Scenery_ in 1824. The tyranny of the foreground still holds him--cows,
boats, shed, outbuildings; but this foreground is less insistent than
usual. How beautiful is the blue-grey ruin rising up against the pale
sunset sky; how limpid is the water, with its reflection of castle and
sail rippling on the quiet surface.
This 'Norham Castle' is one of his 'delight pictures,' but the more
arduous work of the Wizard in 1822 was meditating upon and painting the
'Bay of Baiæ,' with which he proposed to startle the world at the next
Royal Academy exhibition.
CHAPTER XXIX
1823: AGED FORTY-EIGHT
'THE BAY OF BAIÆ': A CRITIC IS CRITICAL, AND A PAINTER IS ENTHUSIASTIC
'Waft me to sunny Baiæ's shore' wrote Turner in the _Fallacies of
Hope_, one of the simple lines, a line that it was quite permissible
to print in the catalogue of the Academy of 1823 against his much
discussed, much criticised, and much loved 'Bay of Baiæ.' The picture
indeed wafts us to Baiæ, one of the most beautiful spots in Italy, and
we are content with its beauty if we neglect the pines, their heavy
shadows, and the figures of Apollo and the Cumæan Sibyl posing in the
shade. But could anything be lovelier than the blue sea rippling on the
yellow sand, the subtle hills and the fairy building, a kind of Claude
'Enchanted Castle' that has passed into a golden dream.
Turner, as I have said before, has his admirers and detractors, and
those who adore part of his achievement and are critical of the rest;
few, if any, admire him all in all. Let me here quote two authorities
on 'The Bay of Baiæ'--Mr. Finberg, a critic who has devoted years
of his life to Turner, and Mr. Wyllie, a painter who has written an
admirable book on the master. The reader can decide which form of
criticism or commentary he prefers: the cold objectivity of the critic
or the glowing subjectivity of the painter. Here is Mr. Finberg on 'The
Bay of Baiæ,' extracted from the admirable Extra Number of _The Studio_
on the 'Water Colours of Turner':--
'It is conceded on all hands that Turner's artistic work went all
to pieces as a result of his Italian experiences. "The Bay of Baiæ"
contains faults altogether new in his completed works. Even the
feeblest of his earlier works had been animated by some central idea
or emotion to which all the parts were subordinated, and which infused
into them whatever of life or significance they possessed. In "The Bay
of Baiæ" the artist has an unusual quantity of material on his hands,
but he can neither find nor invent a pictorial idea to give coherence
to his disconnected observations. The picture is made up of bits of
visual experiences elaborately dovetailed into one another but which
absolutely refuse to combine into any kind of conceptional unity.'
And here is Mr. Wyllie on 'that wonderful work' 'The Bay of Baiæ':--
'Only eight years before, the "Crossing the Brook" was painted in
little more than black, brown, and palest blue, and now Turner has
thrown aside the inky shadows as cold, grey skies and has burst out a
perfect blaze of splendid colour. Years ago when I was a student at
the old Academy schools in Trafalgar Square I used to stroll out at
the luncheon hour or after closing time, to have a look at the Old
Masters in the National Gallery next door. Somehow my feet always
seemed to carry me to this my favourite picture at that time.
'I think the blue sea breaking gently on the sandy shore is one of
the most perfect of Turner's visions of Italy. The little jetty, the
fishing boats, the castle, and the volcanic hill thickly wooded and
piled ridge beyond ridge as they pale into the haze are all most
splendidly painted; the ruins half hidden in vines and long trailing
creepers are well done and take their places in the scheme. There are
thin rich glazes and strong yellows in the foreground and two very
conventional stone pines, which throw a mos unnatural dark shadow
right across the foreground. The Sibyl holding up the cryptic handful
of sand to Apollo as a request for many years of life is painted quite
carelessly; indeed one would almost fancy that the whole of the near
objects were formed up in that rich, juicy fashion merely to drive
back the delicate middle distance and enhance its beauty. There is
no doubt that it does produce that effect, for if you shut out that
part of the composition with your hand the rest of the picture suffers
though the foreground is nothing by itself.'
Turner's contemporaries made the usual remark that the real locality
had been rather freely treated, or, as Thornbury puts it, half
the scene was sheer invention. As a matter of fact 'Baiæ' is more
accurate, from a topographical point of view, than most of Turner's
pictures. Jones wrote across the frame with a piece of chalk the words
'_Splendide Mendaæ._' Turner laughed; he did not even take the trouble
to rub out the chalk. For years the marks remained on the frame.
Here is a pen picture of Turner at this time. David Roberts, who became
one of Turner's most intimate friends, decribes how he first met him at
a meeting of the Artists' Benevolent Fund, one of Turner's pet schemes
which he helped to found and to carry out. It was characteristic of
Turner that he was in favour of hoarding its funds and distributing but
a small sum each year in charity.
Of this meeting of the Artists's Benevolent Fund at the Crown and
Anchor in the Strand, Roberts wrote:--
'Being seated round a table covered with green baize--of course with
the exception of my friend whom I accompainied, John Wilson, all to me
were strangers--a little square built man came in, to whom all paid
respect; the business having begun, he joined in the conversation,
and made some weak attempts at wit--at least I thought so, for no one
seemed to laugh at his jokes but himself! So I asked who this very
facetious little man was, and my astonishment on being told that it
was the 'Great Turner' almost, without meaning a pun, turned my head.'
Turner was not the first great man, and he will not be the last little
man, at whose jokes no one laughs but himself.
CHAPTER XXX
1824: AGED FORTY-NINE
A GLANCE AT SOME OF 'THE RIVERS OF ENGLAND' AND 'HARBOURS OF ENGLAND'
WATER-COLOURS
In 1824 the British National Gallery was founded, and it was decided
by the Committee, which included Sir Robert Peel and Lord Harding, to
buy two of Turner's pictures, for presentation to the Gallery. The
works chosen were 'Dido Building Carthage' and' The Decline of the
Carthaginian Empire.' Five thousand pounds were to be offered for the
two. A memorial was drawn up, and Griffiths, Turner's old friend, was
instructed to present it to the painter.
Turner, we are told by Thornbury,
'was deeply moved, even to tears, for he was capable of intense
feeling. He expressed his pride and delight at such a noble offer from
such men. But his eye caught the word "Carthage" in the memorial,
and he exclaimed sternly: "No, no, they shall not have it"; and upon
Griffiths turning to go, he called out after him: "Oh, Griffiths! make
my compliments to the memorialists, and tell them 'Carthage' may some
day become the property of the nation."'
After this interview, it is said that he went about muttering to
himself--'A great triumph! A great triumph!'
In this year he is apparently fumbling towards lithography. In the
'Brighton and Arundel' Sketch-Book is the following note in his own
handwriting in pencil:--
'Lithography--the soap is ... dissolved by the aqua fortis, being
saturated to the utmost by pieces of Lith stone, then diluted with
water.
'Silicated potash makes gum a white flakey insoluable process (?).'
He had not forgotten his old rivals and masters, as on another page,
written against 'Views on Coast,' are these two words followed by a
note of interrogation--'Claude Morning (?).'
On the 'Academy Auditing' Sketch-Book, Ruskin has made this curious
endorsement: 'Kept as evidence of the failure of mind only.' This
Sketch-Book is devoted mainly to figures, probably Academy finance;
but Turner soon tires of sums, and turns to matters more congenial--to
sketches of a Sleeping Figure, a Running Figure, Nymph with Children,
Satyrs at Play, and A Falling Figure, against which he has scrawled the
words--'Fall of Satan?' On the wrapper of the 'Paris, Seine and Dieppe'
Sketch-Book, Ruskin wrote, 'Containing studies for, I believe, his own
house and furniture.' Having done his duty by these domestic details,
Turner treats himself to a sketch of a Vessel Sailing, to a design for
a Classical Composition, to a Boat with Figures, Cows, etc. And on a
later page is this information, written upon a sketch of the back view
of a man with a fishing-rod:--
'Provide yourself with plenty of gentles in the ... corner of your
jacket pocket. If the aforesaid be old, so much the better because
they [the maggots] will work through the same cleaning themselves
the while. Wade up to an inclination [?] of 45 or thereabouts in the
stream and you are sure to have fish before and behind.'
Turner was never particularly careful about his attire, but to allow
maggots to clean themselves by working through the jacket pocket is
more than most fishermen would allow.
Turner did not exhibit at the Royal Academy this year. He was busy with
_The Rivers of England_, also called _River Scenery_ and its companion,
_The Ports of England_, afterwards re-published as _The Harbours of
England_, all of which were engraved in mezzotint. These beautiful
water-colours have suffered from exposure through many years at the
National Gallery. _The Rivers of England_ were published between 1823
and 1827, and the _Ports_ between 1826 and 1828. The latter series
ended abruptly: some of them were never issued.
Many of us have happy, very happy, memories of days spent among the
Turner water-colours in the National Gallery, where they seemed more
at home in those little rooms on the ground floor than in their august
abode at Millbank. It was an experience to turn (with 'Calais Pier'
and the other dark pictures fresh in the mind) to such lyrical moments
as the four sketches of 'Evening at Petworth Park,' to such wonders as
'Ehrenbreitstein,' 'Bellinzona,' 'The Bridge on Moselle at Coblenz,'
and the 'Rigi from Lucerne.' But I am again anticipating.
In _The Harbours of England_, the handling is still a little hard, and
he does not always escape from the thrall of convention; but there
is beauty in the white towers of 'Dover Castle,' rising up from the
golden sward; in the rainbow arching over 'The Medway'; in the splendid
theatricality of 'North Shields,' with a huge white moon riding in an
excited blue sky, and in the golden loveliness of 'Scarborough Castle.'
In 'Totnes on the Dart,' in _The Rivers of England_, he has almost
discarded the foreground muddle and allows himself merely one boat,
and a group of water birds. Magnificent, overpowering, is the rainbow
cutting the picture in 'Arundel Castle.' What a glory of space he
shows in 'Arundel Park,' and what a tumult of distant rain in 'More
Park.' The ruins of 'Kirkstall Abbey' have a foreground of red, brown
and white cattle, as decorative as a Brueghel. One of the simplest and
the most beautiful of them all is 'Brougham Castle': the ruin rises
from the meadow against a threatening grey-blue sky, cut at the left
by a rainbow; the trees are well observed and simply stated, and very
attractive is the foreground water with the streaming red and yellow
reflections of the castle.
At Cooke's Gallery, he exhibited a water-colour of Hastings, showing
the fish-market on the beach. Perhaps this formal 'Hastings' was the
parent of that most lovely Hastings, one of the 'unfinished' oils, the
Hastings with the red sail, and the flecks of gold and red in the sky.
CHAPTER XXXI
1825: AGED FIFTY
A SOMEWHAT BARREN YEAR COMMENTED ON IN A BITTER LAMENT BY RUSKIN
A somewhat barren year for Turner as regards exhibited work. One
picture only was shown, 'The Harbour of Dieppe,' which the present
generation saw at the Old Masters Exhibition of 1910, a flayed and not
very interesting picture.
The 'Thames' Sketch-Book of 1825 opens with some calculations as to
'the House, Taxes, etc.,' and later there is a water-colour of a Barge
with the following in his handwriting: 'Tarpaulin in the light green.'
In the 'Mortlake and Pulborough' Sketch-Book on a drawing of Three
Views of a River are these notes:--
'Children yoked to twig cart,' 'Sheep,' 'River,' 'Park Monsel' (or
'Mount,') 'Stoten or Storton.'
In the 'Holland' Sketch-Book are eleven successive drawings of Cliffs,
twenty-five of Scenes on Coast, thirty-five of Shipping, and twenty
of Views on the River. This Book also contains a sketch of Terburg's
'Visit of Parents' with this comment: 'Green drapery, beautiful Satin,'
and the following against a drawing of a Bridge: 'The whole of the
Bridge in shadow, Water, Blue-grey. 10 o'clock--at five sunrise.' Here,
finally, is a scene that he may have intended to use as a foreground
written on a drawing of a Market-place:--
'Mountebank selling Eau-de-Cologne, beating a drum,' 'Man trying on
Boots, all on the ground,' 'Bird Cages,' 'Pots,' 'Pans,' etc.
In this year his friend and patron Mr. Fawkes of Farnley died. Turner
was much affected and would never visit the house again. His friendship
with the son, Hawkesworth Fawkes, continued to the end of his life,
to January 31st, 1851, under which date there is a letter to 'dear
Hawkesworth' extant.
Ruskin considered that about 1825 a grievous metamorphosis took place
in Turner, that his work became 'partly satirical, partly reckless, and
partly--and in its greatest and noblest features--tragic'--a bitter
lament.
Well, he was yet to produce such a sane and magnificent work as 'The
Burial of Wilkie,' the antithesis of satire, recklessness, and tragedy;
he was yet to awaken to the vision of 'Rain, Steam, and Speed' which
Mallarmé seeing, said, 'Turner is the greatest painter that has ever
lived.' He was yet to will the later water-colours.
CHAPTER XXXII
1826: AGED FIFTY-ONE
ANOTHER UNIMPORTANT YEAR, IN WHICH HE LEAVES TWICKENHAM
Another unimportant year as regards the exhibition of pictures. It
would almost seem as if Turner were reserving himself, pondering over
his Italian experiences; or it may have been that his time was broken
into by the trouble of leaving Twickenham.
He had taken Sandycombe for 'Dad'; he gave it up for the sake of 'Dad,'
who was always catching cold while working in the garden. 'Without,'
says Monkhouse, 'the pleasant and wholesome neighbourhood of the
Trimmers, with no home but the gloomy, dirty, disreputable Queen
Anne Street, he became more solitary, more self-absorbed or absorbed
in his art (much the same thing with him), and lived only to follow
unrestrained wherever his wayward genius led him, and to amass money
for which he could find no use.'
About this time, too, he added to his troubles by another quarrel with
Cooke the engraver, which prevented a proposed continuation of _The
Southern Coast_ series begun in 1814. Cooke's long letter is extant,
and Turner's most ardent admirers must admit that he shows badly in
the dispute. To set against his treatment of Cooke there is his gruff
kindness to Lawrence _à propos_ of his picture of this year called
'Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat, Evening.' This sea-piece,
which had a brilliant sky, was hung between two portraits by Lawrence.
Being painted in a low key, they suffered from the juxtaposition. 'Sir
Thomas was in despair,' whereupon Turner took some water-colour lamp
black and went all over his sky: 'Why, Turner, what have you done to
your picture?' asked a friend, who had seen it before the coat of
lamp-black. 'Oh! it's all right,' said Turner, 'it will all wash off
after the close of the exhibition.'
The _Inventory_ shows that Turner was abroad this year wandering mainly
by the Meuse, Moselle, and Rhine. On one of the pages containing
'Various Views' Ruskin has the following note: 'It has seven subjects
from Andernach on the Rhine, showing stormy sunsets and drifts of cloud
all completely designed; the best, that on the left in the second
row from the bottom, only measures one inch and a half in length by
three-quarters of an inch in height.'
A 'View of Dieppe Harbour' in the 'Meuse-Moselle' Sketch-Book is one
of twenty coloured sketches found in a parcel with the following
endorsement in Ruskin's handwriting:--
'There are one or two in this parcel that some people might like; I
consider them all done in some careless or sickly state of mind, and
have therefore put all aside, except one.'
Poor Turner! It is hard to have the work of one's bad days as well as
of one's good days passed before the critical eyes of a temperamental
genius who also had his bad and his good days. Ruskin was always either
hot or cold--never tepid. I dip at random into his pages and find
this:--
'In the modern French School, all the colour is taken out of Nature,
and only the mud left. By Turner, all the mud is taken out of Nature,
and only the colour left.'
Great praise for Turner, but grossly unfair to the 'modern French
School.'
CHAPTER XXXIII
1827: AGED FIFTY-TWO
HE PAINTS THE SEA IN THE OPEN, AND SOME THAMES-SIDE PICTURES
In this year Turner is magnificently himself again. His works show an
extraordinary variety, ranging from the peaceful and unambitious twin
pictures of 'Mortlake Terrace,' one on a Summer Morning, the other
on a Summer Evening, to the ambitious and extravagant 'Rembrandt's
Daughter,' wherein the painter pitted himself against the great
Dutchman; but the most welcome work of Turner at this period, and
probably that which gave him the greatest pleasure, arose from his
sojourn at East Cowes Castle with J. Nash, the architect of the
Quadrant, Regent Street, for whom he painted two yachting pictures with
East Cowes Castle in the background.
We can see the beginnings of his magnificent series of yachting
pictures in the Sketch-Books of this year, particularly in those
labelled 'East Cowes Castle' and 'Yachts.' These studies resulted in
the two pictures of East Cowes Castle, exhibited in 1828, one of which
is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum--gold in the sky, gold in the
foreground, and the golden sun in the centre of the picture. I for one
prefer the studies to the pictures--brisk, impulsive atmospheric works,
a delight to the eye. These nine studies, which include the vivid and
amusing 'Between Decks,' are now in the Turner Gallery at Millbank.
They were among the 'unfinished' works exhibited for the first time in
1906. A note to the official catalogue states that--
'These nine pictures were painted on two pieces of canvas measuring 3
feet by 4 feet. Nos. 1993, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001 on one piece, and
Nos. 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999 on the other. Mr. Finberg has communicated
a copy of the following letter, which probably refers to these two
canvases; it is in the possession of C. Mallord Turner, Esq., who has
kindly consented to allow it to be published.
_'"Sunday._
'"I wrote yesterday to Mr. Newman to get a canvas ready--6 feet by 4
feet. I wish you to call and ask if he has it by him and if he gets it
done by Middleton in St. Martin's Lane, or at home. If by Middleton,
then let two be sent; if he does it at home, then he will be some time
about it, and then tell him if he has by him a whole length canvas
to send it instead of preparing the 6 feet 4 canvas. If he has not
then go to Middleton, and if he has one, a whole length canvas, let
him send it me immediately. I want the canvas only I don't want the
stretching-frame made in town if Middleton or Newman has the canvas
ready done, and if a whole length, let either send it down to me at J.
Nash, Esq. East Cowes Castle, Isle of Wight.
If they are both ready send them together rolled up on a small roller
and put the linen things I wrote for on the outside.
"I want some scarlet lake and Dark Lake and Burnt Umber in powder from
Newman's, one ounce each.
1 ounce of mastic.
To Mr. Turner,
Queen Anne Street,
Cavendish Square."'
Turner is now painting the sea in the open air, not in a studio as in
the 'Calais Pier' days. The boats in the two pictures of 'Yacht Racing
in the Solent' are sailing in broken water, their canvases lit and
flecked by sunlight. In No. 2 may be seen the guard-ship moored under
the cliffs upon which East Cowes Castle stands. Each of these fresh and
direct impressions of nature is a small picture, one measuring 1 foot 5
1/2 inches by 2 feet 4 1/2 inches, the other 1 foot 6 inches by 2 feet.
In 'Shipping at Cowes' No. 1, he has chosen a still moment. It is the
morning of the Regatta; the sun is in the position where Turner loved
to place it, in the centre of the sky; the boats are at their moorings
and we see only a few sailors preparing for the day's work. This small
picture was probably a sketch for the 'Regatta at Cowes,' exhibited at
the Royal Academy in 1828.
I never look at 'Between Decks' with the fore-shortened gun pointing
at the blue sea, with the ungainly figures of sailors and marines
accompanied by their wives and sweethearts, making such strong blobs of
colour, but I think of a note by Mr. Finberg in one of the Sketch-Books
of a few years forward prefacing some Turnerian studies which have been
called 'Tone Preparations.'
'A number of these pages have been prepared with smudges of red and
black water-colour, the colour being then dabbed and rubbed, with the
object apparently of producing suggestions of figures, groups, etc. In
some cases these suggestions have been further determined by pencil
work.'
Turner was always careless with the figure. The red and gold sailors
and their sweethearts are little more than suggestions of colour. The
eye sees what it wants to see and he saw this vivid scene on the mess
deck in the mass. There is more detail in 'Rembrandt's Daughter,' which
was lent from Farnley Hall to the 'Fair Women Exhibition' of 1910. How
Turner would have chuckled if he could have known that this work would
be chosen to adorn a gallery devoted to types of Fair Women. He cared
little about making Rembrandt's daughter fair. The idea in his mind was
how he could best adapt and improve Rembrandt's 'Potiphar's Wife' and
beat the Dutchman in the undertaking.
And how he would have chuckled if he could have foreseen that his
'Mortlake Summer Morning,' which he painted in 1826, would be sold in
1908 for twelve thousand six hundred guineas. The companion picture'
Mortlake Terrace Summer Evening' was exhibited in 1827. It is said
that Turner, thinking that a dark object was needed in the foreground,
cut out a dog in black paper and pasted it on to try the effect.
Another version of the story states that the black dog was affixed to
the canvas by a jocular friend in Turner's absence. The dog remains
to this day a dominant note. Those who saw the 'Mortlake Terrace
Summer Morning' in London before it was sold wondered that Turner did
not oftener confine himself to rendering simply and sympathetically
what his eyes saw and what his heart felt. Burger, the great French
critic, considered that these unaffected, straightforward, atmospheric
riverside pictures deserved a place amongst the finest things in art.
'Ce qu'on voit des arbres et des pierres est enveloppé et dévoré par
la lumière; tout semble être la lumière même et jeter aussi des rayons
et des étincelles. Claude le suprême illuminateur n'a jamais rien fait
d'aussi prodigieux.'
These canvases, representing the Thames-side seat of William Moffatt,
used to be known as 'Mortlake Summer Morning' and 'Barnes Terrace
Summer Evening.' It is a matter of regret that they are not in the
Turner Gallery.
In this year the issue began, and continued until 1838, of what was
to have been his _magnum opus_, the _Picturesque Views in England and
Wales._ Says Mr. Rawlinson:--
'In this ill-fated work, which was from first to last commercially
a failure, he proposed to depict every feature of English and Welsh
scenery--cathedral cities, country towns, ancient castles, ruined
abbeys, rivers, mountains, moors, lakes, and sea-coast; every hour of
day--dawn, midday, sunset, twilight, moonlight; every kind of weather
and atmosphere. The hundred or more drawings which he made for the work
are mostly elaborately finished and of high character. Some are perhaps
over-elaborated; in some the figures are carelessly and at times
disagreeably drawn; but for imaginative, poetical treatment, masterly
composition, and exquisite colour the best are unsurpassed. I have
ventured to say elsewhere that in my opinion there are at least a dozen
drawings in the _England and Wales_ series any one of which would alone
have been sufficient to have placed its author in the highest rank of
landscape art.'
The 'Launceston' belonging to Mr. Schwann is certainly an imposing
vision of height and grandeur; all the more imposing by reason of the
tiny figure on horseback in the foreground. I who know Launceston
well have never seen the castle rising sky-high as Turner saw it so
magnificently in his mind's eye. Neither shall I ever see 'Barnard
Castle' as seen by Turner, looking up the Tees towards the castle, in
the sketch he made for the _England and Wales_ water-colour, a poet's
vision of opalescent colour floating in atmosphere.
CHAPTER XXXIV
1828: AGED FIFTY-THREE
THE YEAR WHEN CONSTABLE DESCRIBED TURNER'S VISIONS AS 'GOLDEN,
GLORIOUS, AND BEAUTIFUL'
In 1828 Turner was again in Rome. 'The foreign artists,' says
Thornbury, 'who went to see his pictures could make nothing of them.
Turner's economy and ingenuity were apparent in his mode of framing
those pictures. He nailed a rope round the edges of each and painted it
with yellow ochre in tempera.'
The _Inventory_ shows his travels of this year and the next--'Orléans
to Marseilles'; 'Lyons to Marseilles'; 'Marseilles to Genoa'; 'Coast
of Genoa'; 'Genoa and Florence '; and then the 'Roman and French'
Sketch-Book. On page 26 of the 'Florence to Orvieto' Sketch-Book he
wrote this as if the event had significance: 'Thursday Orvieto.'
One day he made Turnerian poetry:--
'Farewell a second time the Land of all bliss
That cradled liberty could wish and hope
Ere the fell Saxon and Norman band
Flouted her ... on the shore
Why go then? No gentle traveller
Cross thy path save the ...
The yellow, winding Tiber,' etc.
From Rome he wrote several letters. Here is the beginning of one to
George Jones, R.A., showing the manner of Turner's correspondence:--
'Rome, _October 3th,_1828.
'Dear Jones,--Two months nearly in getting to this _terra pictura
and at work_; but the length of time is my own fault. I must see the
South of France, which almost knocked me up, the heat was so intense,
particularly at Nismes and Avignon; and until I got a plunge into the
sea at Marseilles I felt so weak that nothing but the change of scene
kept me onwards to my distant point. Genoa and all the sea-coast from
Nice to Spezzia is remarkably rugged and fine; so is Massa. Tell that
fat fellow Chantrey that I did think of him _then_ (but not the first
or the last time), of the thousands he had made out of those marble
craigs which only afforded me a sour bottle of wine and a sketch; but
he deserves everything which is good though he did give me a fit of
the spleen at Carrara.'
And here is the beginning of a letter to Chantrey:--
'No. 12 Piazza Mignanelli, Rome, _NOV. 6th,_ 1828.
'My Dear Chantrey,--I intended long before this (but you will say
"Fudge!") to have written; but even now very little information have
I to give you in matters of Art, for I have confined myself to the
painting department at Corso; and having finished _one_ am about the
second, and getting on with Lord E.'s, which I began the very first
touch at Rome; but as the folk here talked that I would show them
_not_, I finished a small 3 feet four inches to stop their gabbling. So
now to business....'
The small 3 feet by 4 was the 'View of Orvieto' exhibited in 1830,
referred to with much affection in the opening chapters of this book.
The pictures shown by Turner at the Royal Academy this year evoked from
Constable the generous and beautiful appreciation that I have already
quoted. It bears repetition: 'Turner has some golden visions, glorious
and beautiful. They are only visions, but still they are art, and one
could live and die with such pictures.' What were the works that called
forth this tribute of admiration from his great contemporary? They
were:--
'Dido Directing the Equipment of the Fleet, or the Morning of the
Carthaginian Empire.'
'East Cowes Castle, the seat of J. Nash, Esq. The Regatta beating to
windward.'
'East Cowes Castle, the seat of J. Nash, Esq. The Regatta Starting for
their Moorings.'
'Boccaccio relating the Tale of the Bird-cage.'
Hardly the finest examples of Turner's golden visions; but Constable
found them glorious and beautiful. What did Constable think of the
Turner exhibited next year, that magnificent riot of the imagination,
'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus'?
It was probably during his second visit to Italy that he made the
slight and lovely 'Sketch of an Italian Town,' now in the Victoria and
Albert Museum. This, like the 'Orvieto,' is essential Italy. Rarely
has the feeling of an Italian hill town been given with such intimacy
of observation, just as it looks, a moment snatched and recorded,
artlessly, but with great art.
CHAPTER XXXV
1829: AGED FIFTY-FOUR
THE YEAR OF 'ULYSSES DERIDING POLYPHEMUS'
Of all Turner's pictures, 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus' makes the
strongest appeal to the popular imagination. Call it scenic, call
it theatrical; say that it is like the transformation scene at a
pantomime; admit that it is all wrong, artistically; that it is lighted
from anywhere and everywhere; concede all its impossibilities and
incongruities, and the 'Ulysses' still remains a magnificent effort of
the imagination, a glory to behold, from the figure of Phœbus, rising
with his horses from the sea, to the vast Polyphemus, who, not being a
mortal and bearing no resemblance to nineteenth--century man, is the
most convincing figure that Turner ever painted. How often I visited
the old Turner room at the National Gallery to study this picture or
that, but always finding myself, sooner or later, drawn to this supreme
effort of his imagination.
And now that he had emptied himself of all he knew and all he had
dreamed, of wonder and splendour, came the reaction, and his humorous
contempt of the chatter about this masterpiece, the wonder of the 1829
exhibition. (Yet nobody bought it.)
Thornbury recounts that at a dinner party at which Turner was present,
a lady (she exists to-day, and is still making similar observations)
who had seen the 'Ulysses' said to her neighbour, Mr. Judkins, 'the
clerical artist,'--'Don't you now think it is a sweet picture?'
'Turner, glum and shy, opposite, is watching all this. He sees where
the lady's eyes fall after she addresses her whispers to Mr. Judkins.
His little beads of eyes roll and twinkle with fun and slyness. Across
the table he growls:--
'"I know what you two are talking about, Judkins--about my picture."
'Mr. Judkins suavely waves his glass and acknowledges that it was. The
lady smiled on the great man.
'"And I bet you don't know where I took the subject from; come
now--bet you don't."
'Judkins blandly replied:--
"Oh, from the old poet, of course, Turner; from the _Odyssey_ of
course."
'"No," grunted Turner, bursting into a chuckle; "_Odyssey_; not a bit
of it. I took it from Tom Dibdin. Don't you know the lines:--
'He ate his mutton, drank his wine.
And then he poked his eye out.'"'
To this year also belongs 'Chichester Canal,' unfinished, a scene
of peace and quiet beauty, and was it this year or the next that
he painted 'The Evening Star,' perhaps in its way one of the most
appealing of the 'unfinished' Turners? How beautiful, how perfectly
satisfying it would be if only the figure of the Shrimper and the
dancing dog had been omitted. Truly a contrast to the splendour of the
'Ulysses.' There the sun was rising in fiery magnificence with the
horses of Phoebus dancing up from the waves, and all that mythical
world aglow with colour: here the sun is setting over the darkening
sea, and in the mystical afterglow gleams the evening star reflected in
the water that ripples gently to that lonely beach.
The authority for ascribing 'The Evening Star' to this period is to
be found in some verses on page 70 of the 'Worcester and Shrewsbury'
Sketch-Book, dated 1829-30, among which the following fragments have
been deciphered:--
'Where is the star which shone at ... Eve'--'
The gleaming star of Ever ... '--
The first pale Star of Eve ere Twilight comes
Struggles with ... '
These broken lines may be a reference to 'The Evening Star,' which Mr.
Finberg believes was painted about this time. The Official Catalogue of
the Tate Gallery, however, suggests that 'The Evening Star' may be of
the same date as 'The New Moon' exhibited in 1840.
Two of the other 'unfinished' oils first exhibited in 1906 may have
been painted about this date. Each is similar in composition to sepia
drawings for the _Liber Studiorum_, the 'Rocky Bay with Figures' to the
'Glaucus and Scylla,' which was never published, and the 'Sunrise, a
Castle on a Bay,' to the 'Solitude.' Turner, of course, gave no title
to these suggestions of colour and atmosphere, and he did not exhibit
them. It is only literary pictures that require titles or descriptions.
In one, the sun has risen behind a mist-shrouded castle on a bay; in
the other, sunrays gleam through a natural arch and light the deep
green sea. Greek galleys are moored in the bay and drawn up on the
shore. A man with outstretched arms may be dimly seen haranguing a
group of sailors. We shall never know when or where he painted these
'delight pictures.' They call up the spirit of Turner the poet as the
Sketch-Books call up the spirit of Turner the wanderer.
My eyes fall on the following words in his own handwriting, and for
the moment he seems to be present, noting nature, ready to record some
sudden beauty.
'Moonlight . . . . . .
Fish . . . . . . .
Temple . . . . . . .
. . . . . . Copper
Venice . . . . . . .
Sunrise . . . . . . .
Hare . . . . . . .
Ship--Storm . . . . . .
Evening Sunset . . . . . .
Visions were then passing through the mind of the dumb poet who once
'confessed that he knew much more of his art than he could explain.'
PART SIX
1830-1834
FROM THE 'INTERIOR AT PETWORTH' TO THE PERIOD OF THE 'UNFINISHED' OILS
CHAPTER XXXVI
1830: AGED FIFTY-FIVE
HE PAINTS THE 'INTERIOR AT PETWORTH' AND MOURNS THE DEATH OF HIS
FATHER, AND OF SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE
Two events mark this year: one sad, the death of his father which
affected his whole after life; the other, an epoch in his development
as artist, the painting of the 'Interior at Petworth.' But first a few
words about other matters.
As I have remarked before, critics are occasionally hard upon Turner,
and sometimes they disagree as to what is fine, and what is poor in his
work. Ruskin labelled a parcel of vignette beginnings as 'worthless.'
Mr. Rawlinson, referring to the numerous small drawings for vignette
illustrations, such as Rogers's _Italy_ of 1830, and the _Poems_ of
1834, while calling them 'marvels of execution,' also sees in them 'an
unpleasant note,' often a strangely forced and extravagant colour.
Monkhouse considered that it would be difficult to find in the whole
range of his works two really greater (though so small in size)
than the vignettes of 'Alps at Daybreak,' and 'Datur hora quieti.'
Personally, I must confess to a feeling of lukewarmness in regard to
the vignettes. 'The Burning of the Houses of Parliament' in Sir Edward
Tennant's collection is tight and harsh in colour compared with the
loose luxuriance of the oil picture.
Some one has said that Turner must on the whole have been an agreeable
person to have in a house--if the house were big enough. His visits to
Lord Egremont at Petworth were on much the same footing of intimacy
as his visits to Walter Fawkes at Farnley. Turner had his own private
studio at Petworth, and nobody but Lord Egremont was allowed admission.
Even he, who has been described as 'the rough, cunning, honest old
noble-man,' had to give a peculiar knock on the door before entering.
It is said that Chantrey, when staying at Petworth, imitated Lord
Egremont's peculiar knock, and to Turner's anger entered the room
and saw him at work. This pair of eccentrics, Turner and Egremont,
foregathered happily, and the friendship was severed only in 1837 by
Lord Egremont's death.
The _Inventory_ shows that Turner was at Petworth in 1830. One of the
books contains a sketch for that quaint, attractive 'View in Petworth
Park with Tillington Church in the Distance,' of which an unfinished
version is in the National Collection. The finished oil is in the
possession of Lord Leconfield. Most of the Petworth sketches are in
brilliant tints of opaque colour on grey-blue paper: they resulted one
merry day in that startling, delightful oil picture in the National
Collection called 'Interior at Petworth.' Here is Turner working
entirely for his own pleasure, absolutely indifferent to the forms of
things, seeing the havoc through a mist of sunlight with brilliant rays
shining down into the octagonal sculpture gallery beyond, and reflected
through the Venetian blinds of a window in an alcove to the right.
How the room came to be in this state we do not know. The pugs and
spaniels are evidently enjoying the upturned table and the disarranged
furniture: they caper delightedly over a lady's orange cloak and
feathered bonnet.
I must find room for an extract from a curious and interesting
article upon 'Turner's Path from Nature to Art,' by Professor Josef
Strzygowski, that appeared in the _Burlington Magazine._ The learned
professor devotes his pen to 'The Frosty Morning' and the 'Interior
at Petworth,' which he considers represent the two poles: Nature and
Art. After remarking that in the days when the 'Interior at Petworth'
was painted no sketch was regarded as a picture, and so Turner never
exhibited the Petworth 'Interior' which 'looks almost like an actual
palette, and a palette, moreover, on which the colours have been
thoroughly daubed together, dashes of colour from the paint-brush and
the palette-knife left as they are, without the least intention of
hiding the technique'--Professor Strzygowski proceeds:--
'We do not know what is represented; it seems as if the picture
might just as well hang upside down. And when we have realised that
we are looking upon an interior, where are the separate shapes
expressed? We recognise a large sofa on the right, statues on the
left, in front a little dog. But these three shapes, and all the
others, are so confused, that no one can define their appearance.
But what, then, does the picture really mean? asks the layman.
That is the real discovery of modern times. Sketches in which an
artist gives nothing more than his momentary impression, _i.e._,
lets himself go subjectively, leaving the object, both as regards
its meaning and its appearance, quite in the background, are now
admitted to be finished works of art. The "Interior at Petworth" is
not in Mr. Bell's catalogue. Turner, as we now know, reserved this
work, with so many others, as a private confession of faith.... For
him the shape no longer exists; he sees only light and colour, and
even those transform themselves in a peculiar way. He does not see a
fragment of nature through the medium of his temperament; but gives us
rather, on the contrary, his own temperament seen through a fragment
of nature. Nature is wholly subordinated to his impetuous need for
self-expression.... The representation, the "Interior" in itself,
has no value for him, except in so far as its space can be exhibited
as the recipient of tone and colour: the pictorial symbol, as the
medium of his need for expression, is everything to him; the object,
the thing and its shape, are nothing. Thus the cautious painter of
"The Frosty Morning" becomes an artist; thus the thing he paints is
transformed into spiritual significance, its shape becomes pictorial
symbol; and the technique, which before was carefully veiled, changes
to the boldest impressionism.... Art like this is for epicures.'
Saner and very beautiful is the water-colour, 'On the Lake at Petworth,
Evening,' in the National Collection, although I am bound to say that
this golden and blue impression is equally beautiful if you look at it
upside down.
In the 'Brighton and Arundel' Sketch-Books (1830), we find the
following in Turner's handwriting on 'A View Looking Out to Sea with a
Sailing Boat':--
'Beautiful effect of----,' 'Green Top' (_e._ to waves), 'foam grey in
shade'--'reflections of the Boat ... in water,' 'Reflection of the Boy
[?] on the Sail,' 'The warmth of the Tan Sail,' etc.
Perhaps from these notes he painted the luminous and peaceful 'Old
Chain Pier, Brighton,' with the sun low in a yellow haze gilding
the sail, and the reflections of boat and sail in the still water.
Certainly from this 'study' he composed the finished Brighton picture
in the collection of Lord Leconfield. 'A Ship Aground,' which appears
to be a pendant to 'The Old Chain Pier, Brighton,' is equally luminous
and peaceful, in spite of the ground swell, and the movement of the
small craft about the disabled ship.
In the 'Dieppe and Rouen and Paris' Sketch-Book, we find sketches of
three pictures, probably Claudes or Poussins, with long descriptions in
Turner's handwriting, of which the following are samples:--
'The trees are grey and dull green and the whole foreground cold,
the earth particularly cold with a few touches of warm red, but
the _ground_ in the picture never protrudes itself or through the
_Colours_' ... 'The sky is very blue at the top with some small white
clouds with grey shadows, but at the Hor. [horizon] yellow, so that
the distant mountains are relieved and Blue.'
In another Sketch-Book are a number of water-colours on blue paper,
probably connected with _The Rivers of France_ series, published
between 1833 and 1835.
Turner suffered a great blow this year in the death of his father,
for whom he had a deep affection. 'Dad' had been of great use to his
famous son, helping in the preparation of his canvases, attending to
the gallery of unsold pictures, and so forth. When they were staying at
Twickenham, he would travel to town every morning to open the gallery,
riding with the market gardeners, who conveyed him to London for a
glass of gin a day (his own arrangement). 'Dad' was as careful of money
as was his son, who was wont to chuckle, 'Dad taught me nothing except
to save halfpence.'
Turner was never again the same man after the death of his father.
In this year Sir Thomas Lawrence also died. The Turner Collection at
Millbank contains a sketch of the funeral, looking like a double-page
in an illustrated weekly. The following letter shows how the death of
Lawrence affected him:--
'Dear Jones,--I delayed answering yours until the chance of this
finding you in Rome, to give you some account of the dismal prospect
of Academic affairs, and of the last sad ceremonies paid yesterday to
departed talent gone to that bourn from whence no traveller returns.
Alas! only two short months Sir Thomas followed the coffin of Dawe to
the same place. We then were his pall-bearers. Who will do the like
for me, or when, God only knows how soon! However, it is something
to feel that gifted talent can be acknowledged by the many who
yesterday waded up to their knees in snow and muck to see the funeral
pomp swelled up by the carriages of the great, _without the persons
themselves.'_
Turner's father was buried in the parish church of St. Paul's, Covent
Garden, where the painter had been baptized. The plain epitaph was
written by Turner; it bears no scriptural text.
CHAPTER XXXVII
1831: AGED FIFTY-SIX
HE TURNS HIS 'MAGIC LIMELIGHT' ON 'CALIGULA'S PALACE AND BRIDGE';
VISITS SIR WALTER SCOTT, AND MAKES HIS WILL
The Wizard makes a great effort this year, sending no fewer than
six pictures to the Royal Academy, and among them was the famous
'Caligula's Palace and Bridge, Bay of Baiæ,' with this quotation from
the _Fallacies of Hope_:--
'What now remains of all the mighty bridge
Which made the Lucrine lake an inner pool,
Caligula, but massy fragments left
As monuments of doubt and ruined hopes
Yet gleaming in the morning's ray, that tell
How Baiæ's shore was loved in times gone by.'
In this return to classicism Turner is even more wilful than usual with
nature. Undoubtedly there are two suns present, as Mr. Wyllie points
out, one of them shining straight through the rents in the palace wall,
the other illuminating the boy and girl sitting on an unsubstantial
yellow rock. In fact, 'Turner has turned his magic limelight on where
his fancy prompted him, and has given us only as much nature as he
thought good for us.'
Fanciful and unrealised is 'Watteau Painting,' with the following
quotation from Du Fresnoy's _Art of Painting._
'White, when it shines with unstained lustre clear,
May bear an object back, or bring it near.'
Turner was greatly interested in the theory of colour. He read and
annotated Goethe's _Theory of Colour_, his copy of which is among the
'Relics' at the Tate Gallery.
The 'Watteau Painting' panel shows that artist, standing in the centre
of the room, making a drawing of a lady and a gentleman reclining
upon a divan. We have a glimpse of Turner's fun in the sketch he made
at Petworth of himself, in the place of Watteau, painting in a room
surrounded by some of the ladies of the household. I have nothing to
say in favour of 'Lord Percy under Attainder,' except to remark that
the dame in yellow is taken from a picture by Van Dyck at Petworth.
To this year belongs the golden 'Admiral Van Tromp's Barge at the
Entrance of the Texel,' in the Soane Museum. Turner painted three or
four Van Tromp pictures at different periods: one is in Sir Edward
Tennant's collection, another is loaned by the nation to Sheffield, and
a fourth, painted as late as 1844, is in the Royal Holloway College.
All bear slightly different titles, and all are breezy and golden.
Another picture of 1831, a fine, wild sea-piece, is in the Victoria
and Albert Museum. The title is an apt description: 'Life Boat and
Manby Apparatus going off to a Stranded Vessel making Signals (Blue
Lights) of Distress.' The 'Sketch of Cochem on the Moselle' needs no
description. It is a mere impression of light and movement, a quick
record, unfinished if you like, yet quite finished in its statement of
essential beauty.
Turner made a special journey to Scotland this year to make
illustrations for Sir Walter's Scott _Poetical and Prose Works._
Turner was the guest of Sir Walter, and together they visited the
most interesting spots on the Tweed and the Border, and in one of the
plates--the Melrose--he, Scott and Cadell, small figures, are shown
together, picnicking on a height overlooking the river and the Abbey.
On the 10th of June he signed his will, to be followed later by
codicils, the vast, complicated will that he brooded over so long,
that produced interminable litigation, with the result that almost all
of his behests were disregarded. The Turner Gallery at Millbank is a
magnificent, if tardy, reparation.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
1832: AGED FIFTY-SEVEN
HE PAINTS 'CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE' AND IS JOCULAR ON VARNISHING DAY
'... and now, fair Italy!
Thou art the garden of the world,
Even in thy desert what is like to thee?'
This, the beginning of an extract from Byron, accompanied his 'Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage'--that late golden afternoon, Italy basking in
the heat haze. The stone pine has been mercilessly criticised; but
although that useful tree and the foreground pictures are carelessly
painted, how beautiful is the horse-shoe bend of the placid river, and
the suffused light on ruin, convent, walled town, and distant hills,
illumined from the sun sinking behind the mountains.
There is a story connected with two of his other pictures of this
year, 'Helvoetsluys--the City of Utrecht, 'Going to Sea,' and that
impossible work with the unwieldy title illustrating Shadrach, Meshach
and Abednego coming forth from the burning fiery furnace. Turner
asked George Jones, R.A., what he intended to paint for the ensuing
exhibition. 'Oh!' said Jones, 'the Fiery Furnace, with Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednego.' 'A good subject,' said Turner, 'I'll do it also.'
In the exhibition Jones's picture of 'The Fiery Furnace' was placed
opposite to Turner's grey 'Helvoetsluys,' and next to Constable's 'The
Opening of Waterloo Bridge.' Turner, who had been watching Constable
brightening the flags and decorations of his city barges with vermilion
and lake, realised that the flutter of colour was making his own grey
picture look insignificant. Suddenly he put a round daub of red lead,
somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, and departed without
a word. The intensity of the red lead caused even the vermilion and
lake of Constable to look weak.
When Constable saw the red lead he said--'Turner has been here and
fired off a gun.' 'A coal,' cried Cooper, 'has bounced across the room
from Jones's "Fiery Furnace," and set fire to Turner's sea.' The great
man did not visit the room for a day and a half; then, in the last
moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he
had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy.
Constable, according to Thornbury, was secretly very severe on Turner's
pictures, which does not tally with his spoken and written enthusiasm.
Little did Constable, or any one else, realise the work that Turner
was yet to do. In the following year, at the age of fifty-eight, he
exhibited his first Venetian picture--Venice--that was to absorb and
haunt him, and inspire some of the most lovely visions of his ageing
eyes.
CHAPTER XXXIX
1833: AGED FIFTY-EIGHT
HE PAINTS HIS FIRST 'VENICE' PICTURE AND RE-PURCHASES SOME OF HIS OWN
DRAWINGS AT AUCTION
Venice, 'the last home of his imagination,' if we exclude the mountains
of Switzerland, and the Thames of England, where he found his final
solace, begins to inspire his brush, but not the visionary Venice that
he was to evolve later, visions of colour and light which seem to be
floating from sight even as we look at them. First the spade work--that
was Turner's way. As he began painting the sea from the pictures of Van
de Velde, so he began painting Venice from the pictures of Canaletto,
and in this first interpretation, or rather illustration, of Venice, he
introduced, in his quaint, admiring way, his hero for the moment, at
work. 'The Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom House, Canaletto
Painting,' is a sober topographical performance compared with his
later pictures of the bride of the Adriatic. Indeed the quotation from
Rogers's _Italy_ gives more of a lilt to the imagination than the
picture:--
'There is a glorious city in the sea,
The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets,
Ebbing and flowing; and the salt sea-weed
Clings to the marble of her palaces.'
No fewer than twenty-seven pictures of Venice by Turner have been
catalogued.
Between 1833 and 1835 were published the beautiful series of _The
Rivers of France_ known as _Turner's Annual Tour._ The letterpress was
by Leitch Ritchie, but they did not travel together 'as their tastes
were dissimilar.' Ritchie gives the following description of the
artist's methods:--
'His exaggerations, when it suited his purpose, were wonderful;
lifting up, for instance, by two or three stories, the steeple, or
rather the stunted cone of a village church. I never failed to roast
him on the habit. He took my remarks in very good part, sometimes
indeed in great glee, never attempting to defend himself otherwise
than by rolling back the war into the enemy's camp. In my account of
the famous Gilles de Retz, I had attempted to identify that prototype
of "Blue Beard" with the hero of the nursery story, by absurdly
insisting that his beard was so intensely black that it seemed to have
a shade of blue. This tickled the great painter hugely; and his only
reply to my bantering was, his little sharp eyes glistening the while,
"Blue Beard! Blue Beard! Black Beard!"'
There were sixty drawings in this wonderful series, most of which are
in the Turner Gallery. He did not sell these water-colours, preferring
to lend them to the publishers for engraving purposes for which he
charged from five to seven guineas each. Ruskin tells how one day
Turner brought to him the sixty drawings for _The Rivers of France_
rolled in dirty brown paper, offering them for twenty-five guineas
each. Ruskin, to his grief, could not persuade his father to spend the
money. In later years he had to pay a thousand pounds for the seventeen
which he gave to Oxford. To look through this series is to be again
impressed by the range of Turner's genius. Which is the most beautiful?
I know not. Sometimes one, sometimes another--the blue mystery of 'The
Light Towers of Hève,' the huddled splendour of 'Sunset in the Port of
Havre,' the wild translucent sweep of the tidal wave in 'Quellebœuf,'
the quiet splendour, infinity on a few inches of paper, of 'The Seine
between Tancarville and Quellebœuf,' the poetry of 'Caudebec,' the
fantasy of 'Jumiéges,' the charm of 'The Post Road from Vernon to
Nantes,' the mystery of 'St. Denis.' Invited to pick one, I should
hardly know which to choose. What a parcel of dreams for Turner to
bring to Ruskin rolled in dirty brown paper. And while Turner the poet
was preparing to realise these dreams, Turner the man was casting his
acquisitive eye on former works of his own that came into the market.
When Dr. Munro died in 1833, Turner attended the sale of his pictures,
and acquired a great many of his own early works; no doubt he bought
others too, as among the doubtful drawings catalogued at the end of
the _Inventory_, are many by different hands. Turner informed the
auctioneer that some of the drawings attributed to him were not his.
That must have been an interesting spectacle. For Turner, when he had a
grievance, did not conceal it.
CHAPTER XL
1834: AGED FIFTY-NINE
SOME OLD STORIES AND SOME AGELESS COLOUR STUDIES
Turner, in his sixtieth year, is on the threshold of the period when
colour and light were more and more to obsess him to the exclusion of
form and detail. In the _Inventory_, there are books labelled simply
'Colour Studies,' and among the water-colours connected with his
'Meuse-Moselle-Rhine' tour are some bearing such suggestive titles as
'Crimson Ruins,' 'Vermilion Towers,' 'Tower in Sunbeam,' 'Blue Hills,'
'Ruins with Rainbow.' In the 'Colour Studies' Sketch-Book there are
nearly fifty pages described merely as 'Colour Sketches'; and on the
last page are several lines of illegible verse. Also, after a sketch of
a 'Ruined Castle on a Rock' a recipe 'said to be an infallible cure for
the bite of a mad dog.'
In the 'Oxford and Bruges' Sketch-Book he breaks into this:--
'Old Tom, of Christ Church, Oxford. What? is it you Old Tom that keep
this row every night? What? is it right that _you_ should summon us to
bed at nine continually all the year round? Is it fair that you, Tom,
should thus deal with us every night?'
With my mind full of the visionary Turner, the dreamer and the troubled
traveller, I am a little impatient of 'The Golden Bough' of this year;
so apparently were the trustees of the National Gallery, as they
banished it to Dublin. As to 'St. Michael's Mount,' now in the Victoria
and Albert Museum, how beautiful would be the pale gold Mount, rising
from a pale gold shore into a grey-blue sky, if the foreground with its
fish and figures, boat and lobster-pots, could be banished. The fine
and whirling spectacle of the 'Fire at Sea,' that looks so well in its
new home at Millbank, was composed, no doubt, from 'The Fire at Sea'
Sketch-Book, which has this endorsement by Ruskin: 'A careless book:
the fine ships on fire taken out of it and very little left.'
He exhibited another Venice subject this year, probably the Venice
about which Thornbury tells a story: how the inevitable Jones, who
was showing a picture with a blue sky in it, tried to paint his sky
brighter, so as to make it outshine Turner's, which hung alongside.
Turner then made his sky still more blue, whereupon Jones painted out
his blue sky altogether and put in a white one.
'Ah! Jones,' said Turner, 'you've done me now.'
Here may be told once again the story of the encounter between Gillott
the pen manufacturer and Turner, in Thornbury's own words:--
We are told that one day Mr. Gillott, the well-known manufacturer of
Birmingham, sallied forth from his hotel, determined at any price to
obtain admission to the enchanted house in Queen Anne Street. He was
rich, he was enthusiastic--he believed strongly in the power of the
golden key to open any door. He arrived at the blistered dirty door of
the house with the black-crusted windows. He pulled at the bell; the
bell answered with a querulous, melancholy tinkle. There was a long
inhospitable pause; then an old woman with a diseased face looked up
from the area, and presently ascended and tardily opened the door,
keeping the filthy chain up, however, as a precaution. She snappishly
asked Mr. Gillott's business. He told her in his blandest voice. "Can't
let 'e in," was the answer, and she tried to slam the door. But during
the parley the crafty and determined Dives had put his foot in, and
now, refusing to any longer parley, he pushed past the feeble, enraged
old she-Cerberus, and hurried upstairs to the gallery. In a moment
Turner was out upon him like a spider on another spider who has invaded
his web. Mr. Gillott bowed, introduced himself, and stated that he had
come to buy. "Don't want to sell," or some such rebuff, was the answer;
but Gillott shut his ears to all Turner's angry vituperations. "Have
you ever seen our Birmingham pictures, Mr. Turner?" was his only remark.
'"Never 'eard of 'em," said Turner.
'Gillott pulled from his pocket a silvery fragile bundle of Birmingham
bank-notes (about £5000 worth).
'"Mere paper," said Turner, with grim humour, a little softened, and
enjoying the joke.
'"To be bartered for _mere_ canvas," said Gillott, waving his hand at
the "Building of Carthage" and its companions.
'"You're a rum fellow!" said Turner, slowly entering into negotiations,
which ended in Gillott eventually carrying off in his cab some five
thousand pounds' worth of Turner's pictures.'
These old stories, when one has heard them once, are not very
exhilarating, but they all have truth in their well of words. It is
pleasant to turn from them, and merely to repeat the titles of some of
the sketches mentioned before, sounding as beautiful as they look, and
to glance at such a delicate drawing as the 'View on the Moselle,' and
to follow the river feeling for its level between the flushed hills.
And it is pleasant, too, to know that the time has now come to consider
the loveliest of the 'unfinished' oils, the pictures painted for his
own delight in moments of exhilaration, that were revealed to the
public in 1906. It is probable that the most delicate and evanescent of
them were painted at intervals between this year and 1838. Unsigned,
unnamed, undated, it is impossible to give them a certain date, and
really it does not much matter. Turner painted them; the nation has
them: that is all we need to know.
PART SEVEN
1833-1845
FROM A CONSIDERATION OF THE 'UNFINISHED OILS TO' RAIN, STEAM AND SPEED'
AND THE LAST SKETCH-BOOKS
CHAPTER XLI
1835: AGED SIXTY
SOME REMARKS ON THE 'UNFINISHED' OILS, AND _BLACKWOOD'S_ ATTACK ON HIS
'VENICE' PICTURE OF THIS YEAR
Ruskin, to whom we owe so much, whose prose delights, consoles,
inspires, confuses, bewilders and annoys in turn; who, by his very
enthusiasm for Turner, occasionally ill-judged and unfair to other
painters, is sometimes of disservice to Turner, has nevertheless
constructed an edifice of interpretation, praise and blame that must
last as long as the pictures themselves. Certain of Ruskin's phrases
are unforgettable; one consists of but two words--'Delight Drawings,'
designed to describe the water-colours Turner made during the last ten
years of his working life; not done for the engraver or for exhibition,
but just for his own pleasure. 'I look upon them,' said Ruskin, 'as
more valuable than his finished drawings or his oil pictures, because
they are the simple record of his first impressions and first purposes,
plans or designs of the pictures which, if he had had time, he would
have made of each place.'
Since these words were written, we have learnt to esteem even more
highly these 'Delight Drawings,' and to regard them as the final and
highest expressions of Turner's genius. With the inward eye I see
Turner walking about a town with a roll of thin paper in his pocket, as
Ruskin has described, making a few scratches upon a sheet or two, mere
shorthand indications of all he wished to remember, then at his inn
in the evening completing the pencilling rapidly, and adding 'as much
colour as was needed to record his plan of the picture.'
Thus in the last decade of his life, when he had mastered his craft,
turned away from the works of all other painters to the fair face of
nature, did Turner produce his 'Delight Drawings.'
Equally quickly, happily and impulsively did he produce the
'unfinished' oils. Could there be a better name for these
'water-colours writ large,' than 'Delight Pictures,' done like the
drawings for his own pleasure, in moments of impulse while he was
working upon exhibition pictures, much as a man, when writing a history
of a county, might break off to record in a hundred words, a 'thing
seen,' something of the present, that had spoken to his heart while
studying the present manners and customs of the county?
It is impossible to date accurately all the 'Delight Pictures,' a
list of which is given in the chapter towards the end of this book
describing the sensation caused by the exhibition of the 'unfinished'
oils in 1906. The 'Rocky Bay with Figures,' and the 'Sunrise, a Castle
on a Bay,' both founded on sepia drawings for the _Liber_, may have
been done as early as 1829 or 1830; the 'Yachting' series certainly
belong to 1827; the 'Chain Pier, Brighton,' and the 'Ship Aground' to
1830, and 'The Evening Star' may be as early as 1829, or as late as
1840. Some, the most delicate and evanescent, wonders of light, flushes
of colour, may have been painted any time between 1830 and 1840;
others, perhaps later, as 'The Burning of the Ships,' and 'Sunrise
and a Sea Monster,' which probably belong to the 'Whalers' period. It
is impossible to describe them, and as many are reproduced in colour
in this volume, the attempt is hardly necessary. The catalogue of
the Turner Gallery bravely attempts description and elucidation; but
these works were never meant either to be titled or described. I am
content merely to look at the crepuscular beauty of the nocturne with
the evening star; at the deep green sea lighted near the shore by a
gleam of golden sunlight in 'A Rocky Bay with Classic Figures,' unaware
until I am told, that Greek galleys are moored in the bay and drawn
up on the shore, and that a shadow of a man is haranguing a group of
shadowy sailors; at the mist-shrouded castle behind which the sun is
rising--Turner the mystic, the initiate in light and colour.
But if these are beautiful, what word can describe the 'Sunrise with
a Boat between Headlands,' the 'Hastings,' and the 'Norham Castle,
Sunrise,' his final vision of the ruin that he had painted again
and again (see Frontispiece). It has now become a mere whisper of
light and colour, a half-uttered murmur of the wonder of sunrise.
Detail has gone; it is flooded in light; the old familiar foreground
has disappeared, leaving only the glory of the sky reflected in the
water with the note of red, the blue rampart, and the haze that is
all colours. What is to be said about 'Sunrise, with a Boat between
Headlands'? I look at it, love it, and easily forget the useful
information given in the catalogue to the effect that a water-colour
similar in composition, once in the collection of the late Sir James
Knowles, is said to be a view on the Lake of Lucerne. Hastings, too,
Turner painted again and again, but never did he realise so perfectly
the atmospheric vision that he once had of ugly Hastings as in this
'Delight Picture,' with the amber and golden sails rising to the pale
blue sky, the amber sail strong against the rosy light on the cliffs.
And the misty, yellow sunrise of the 'Bridge and Tower,' with the
dreamland viaduct spanning the dreamland river, is it not beautiful?
But when he painted that stalwart tree to the right, I think Turner's
imagination flagged.
Delight Pictures! Delight Drawings! One of the drawings rises before
me as I write, a late one done a few years before his death, that
exquisite 'Study on the Rhine,' body colour on grey paper, in the
collection of Sir Edward Durning-Lawrence. I have no words to describe
this wonder of misty blue and gold, with the moon riding in a sky
charged with the mystery of essential colour. We are all, like Ruskin,
extravagant at times in speaking and writing of the finest work of
Turner. A man, long dead, a contemporary, said: 'There are parts of
some of them wonderful, and by God, all other drawings look heavy and
vulgar.'
A living man said in my hearing: 'They are the finger of God: there is
no other way to describe them.'
I must now take up the story of Turner's exhibited pictures in 1835,
which included 'Line Fishing off Hastings,' now in the Victoria and
Albert Museum; 'Venice from the Porch of Madonna della Salute,' now
in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, signed on a floating plank, the
picture which _Blackwood_ attacked; and two versions of the magnificent
'Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons,' one shown at the Royal
Academy, the other at the British Institution. Turner had watched
the conflagration the year before, as the 'Burning of the Houses of
Parliament' Sketch-Book of 1834 tells us. There are also water-colours
of this subject in the National Collection, and at Farnley, and a
vignette in Sir Edward Tennant's collection. As a nocturne the 'Burning
of the Houses of Parliament' is as furious as 'The Evening Star' is
peaceful. Dim boats push out into the lurid light reflected in the
water; other boats linger in the pools and eddies within the shadow of
the bridge; the whole scene is a bustle of colour, from pale primrose
on the bridge in shadow, to the hurry of red and yellow in the night
sky bright with the illumined smoke. The Royal Academy version was, we
are told, almost repainted by Turner on Varnishing Day. 'He finished
it on the walls the last two days before the gallery was opened to the
public'. The authority is Scarlett Davies, whose letter on the subject
I have already quoted: 'I am told it was good fun to see the great man
whacking away with about fifty stupid apes standing around him, and I
understand that he was cursedly annoyed--the fools kept peeping into
his colour-box, examining all his brushes and colours.'
Thornbury tells us that Lord Hill, on looking at the picture,
exclaimed: 'What's this? Call this painting? Nothing but dabs.' But
upon retiring and catching its magical effects, he added: 'Painting!
God bless me. So it is.'
In this year the attacks in the press began, heralded by _Blackwood_,
with a severe criticism of 'Venice from the Porch of Madonna della
Salute.' The writer in _Blackwood_ said:--
'Venice, well I have seen Venice. Venice the magnificent, glorious,
queenly, even in her decay--with her rich, coloured buildings,
speaking of days gone by, reflected in the _green_ water. What is
Venice in this picture? A flimsy, whitewashed, meagre assemblage of
architecture, starting off ghostlike into unnatural perspective, as
if frightened at the affected blaze of some dogger vessels (the only
attempt at richness in the picture). The greater part of the picture
is white, disagreeable white, without light or transparency, and the
boats, with their red worsted masts, are as gewgaw as a child's toy,
which he may have cracked to see what it is made of. As to Venice,
nothing can be more unlike its character.'
Poor old Turner! But this 'Venice' as not a good picture. John Ruskin,
then sixteen years of age, read the article in _Blackwood_, read it
with indignation, and his brain became a tumult of thoughts, and, when
the attack was continued, he wrote a letter. Seven years later that
letter became a book, the first volume of _Modern Painters._
CHAPTER XLII
1836: AGED SIXTY-ONE
THE RECEPTION OF 'JULIET AND HER NURSE' PROCLAIMS THAT TURNER IS
BEGINNING TO LOSE FAVOUR WITH THE PUBLIC
This year, alas! Turner exhibited 'Juliet and her Nurse,' and 'Mercury
and Argus.' How strange it is that the hand that was painting Delight
Drawings and Pictures for pleasure should also be producing 'Juliet
and her Nurse' and 'Mercury and Argus' for exhibition. Even kindly
Time has not brought 'Mercury and Argus' into favour. Shown at the
Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, all a modern critic could say was:
'It is charitable to suppose that it was hastily produced for purposes
of exhibition, with a carelessness as to technical structure which
time has exposed.' The contemporary attacks on 'Juliet and her Nurse,'
following the severe criticism in _Blackwood_ of the Venice picture,
provoked Ruskin to write the letter, the germ of _Modern Painters_,
mentioned in the foregoing chapter. This defence by the fiery champion
of seventeen was acknowledged by Turner' with thanks but without
praise,' and he added, 'I never move in these matters.'
During the journey to Italy, which Turner made this year with Mr.
Munro of Novar, I do not suppose that he ever mentioned the name of
Ruskin. That must have been rather a difficult journey, as Munro of
Novar was suffering from a 'great depression of spirits'; but the trip
seems to have been of benefit to Munro. He reports that Turner enjoyed
himself in his way--'a sort of honest Diogenes way '--and that he was
companionable enough if such teasing questions were avoided as to how
he got this or that colour.
Turner never rhapsodised about scenery. His usual morning question
during that journey was, 'Have you got the sponge?' He was fond of
laconic remarks. One of them I shall always remember. Ruskin, before
starting forth on a certain foreign tour, called upon Turner to bid him
good-bye, the ardent youth no doubt expecting, hoping for, priceless
words of counsel; but Turner was mainly anxious that the young author
should not give his parents cause for anxiety on his travels. 'They
will be in such a fidge about you,' were his parting words.
CHAPTER XLIII
1837: AGED SIXTY-TWO
'TROUBLES BEGIN TO GATHER ABOUT HIM. NOTHING WILL GO RIGHT'
The pictures exhibited in 1837 did not restore Turner to favour. They
included the 'Snowstorm, Avalanche and Inundation,' described as a
'tumult of cloud, wind and raging torrent in the gorge,' the sketch
for which he had made on his way to Italy with Munro of Novar; and
the 'Departure of Regulus,' which Ruskin included among the 'nonsense
pictures.'
Troubles begin to gather about him. Nothing will go right. The
beautiful _England and Wales_ series had been received with so little
favour that it was decided to discontinue the issue. The stock was put
up for auction, but Turner opened negotiations and purchased the whole
privately for three thousand pounds. Many of those present were willing
to buy portions of the work. To one of these Turner said: 'So, sir, you
were going to buy my _England and Wales_ to sell cheap, I suppose--make
umbrella prints of them, eh? But I have taken care of that. No more of
my plates shall be worn to shadows.'
The dealer tried to explain that he wanted only the printed stock, and
Turner seemed to understand, made an appointment, then forgot all about
the matter.
Fighting the world of men, he never wearied in finding his way about
the world of nature, recording his impressions, and adding with
difficulty to his small stock of education. On the first page of the
'Dresden' Sketch-Book is the following:--
'I want to go to Berlin.
Ich will nach Berlin gehen.
I wish to see.
Ich wollte--sehen, etc.'
A little later he comes into his own joys again--twenty-one pages of
'Buildings,' and sixteen of 'Views on River,' with sketches of sunsets
and rocks, distant coasts and sailing boats--anything so long as it was
beautiful in light, line or movement.
CHAPTER XLIV
1838. AGED SIXTY-THREE
A 'NONSENSE PICTURE' OF 1838 WHICH IN 1878 FETCHED £5460 AT AUCTION
From this year onward until after 1845, when his health began to fail,
Turner spent more and more time on the Continent, making his beloved
impressions of the moment, and producing the unrivalled water-colours
of his 'latest phase,' each a 'vision of delight.' The Sketch-Books
of the period are records of foreign travel. Venice and the Lake of
Lucerne were the places of his heart's choice. I know not how many
times he drew the Righi, making the mountain now dark, now pale, now
red, now blue; or how many times he painted Venice, her churches,
her buildings and her water-ways until in the end the city in the
sea became a celestial city in a dream--his dream. The exhibited
pictures of 1838 are splendid failures. They included 'Modern Italy'
and 'Ancient Italy,' the latter classed by Ruskin among the 'nonsense
pictures.' Here is the passage: '"Caligula's Bridge," "Temple of
Jupiter," "Departure of Regulus," "Ancient Italy," "Cicero's Villa,"
and such others, come they from whose hand they may, I class under the
general head of "nonsense pictures." 'But so strange a creature is man,
so deaf to advice, that this 'Ancient Italy' was sold by auction in
1878 for £5460. Some prize Turner's failures higher than the successes
of other men.
'Phryne Going to the Public Bath as Venus--Demosthenes taunted by
Aeschines,' I have not seen. It is one of the Turners that were
withdrawn from the walls of the National Gallery. Mr. Wyllie describes
this procession of dancing girls, madly throwing a white Cupid into
the air and pirouetting, as woven into a bewildering maze of light and
colour.
'Drawing is neglected, and the most audacious expedients resorted to,
increasing the brilliancy and the movement of the throng. Some of
the faces are white with vermilion shadows. The head of Demosthenes
is twisted out of all likeness to human form. In fact everything is
sacrificed to colour.'
Never has Turner been so wilful as he is now at the age of sixty-three.
Think of it--sixty-three, and wilder, more revolutionary, more
indifferent to convention than a hot-headed youth of twenty-three. 'He
paints white sails or buildings up against a sunset, which is a thing
impossible.' He disregards drawing and form, and squeezes features
'together into one corner of a face, slanting diagonally across it like
handwriting' ... True.
But the magician conquered, not through these wildnesses, but in spite
of them. Even when most extravagant, there is enough of the essential
Turner to make the picture great. His dreams were too vast for the poor
tools at his command; he tripped over his tools, he tripped up over
nature; but he did what no other man has ever been able to do. And
he could still be magnificently sane when he painted something that
his eyes had seen, not something that his chaotic fancy had imagined.
The year following the 'Phryne,' he exhibited one of his sanest, and
probably his most popular picture--'The Fighting Téméraire Tugged to
Her Last Berth to be Broken up,' the last picture of his 'at which no
stone was thrown.' And he gave to it a true and trite tag of poetry,
which I take the liberty of writing as prose, that the curious reader
may amuse himself by trying to recast the line into poetry: 'The flag
which braved the battle and the breeze no longer owns her.' The first
nine words may be by some esteemed poet: none but Turner would have
written the last four words as a line of verse.
CHAPTER XLV
1839: AGED SIXTY-FOUR
'THE FIGHTING TÉMÉRAIRE,' AND A SEA-PIECE ON A VISITING-CARD
A party of the Academy Club were journeying to Greenwich, on their
annual visit, when the steamer passed a tug with an old battleship in
tow.
'There's a fine subject for you, Turner,' said Clarkson Stanfield,
And Turner, who could take a hint from anybody, looked, chuckled,
ruminated, no doubt made a pencil sketch, and the result was 'The
Fighting Téméraire.'
She was launched at Chatham Dockyard in 1798: she had been the second
ship in Nelson's division at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Sold
out of the service at Sheerness in 1838, she was now being towed to
Rotherhithe to be broken up. Her career was ended, but Turner has
made the memory of the old wooden warrior immortal. 'The Fighting
Téméraire' is too well known to be described. Pages and pages have been
written about the picture with scornful comments that the sun and the
mast are in the wrong places, and I know not what else. The mast, of
course, should not be abaft the funnel; this curious error, or perhaps
intention on Turner's part so that nothing should interfere with that
black note, was corrected by J. T. Willmore, in his engraving. The
'Téméraire' as popular. No abusive voice, says Ruskin, was ever raised
against it. 'And the feeling was just, for of all pictures and subjects
not visibly involving human pain, this is, I believe, the most pathetic
that was ever painted.'
An admirer who tried to purchase the 'Téméraire,' had a long interview
with Turner in Queen Anne Street, but the painter could not be
induced to put a price upon the picture, although he offered to take
a commission of the same size at two hundred guineas. There is the
usual Varnishing Day story told about the 'Téméraire.' Geddes, who had
a portrait hung above, realising that his picture was killed by the
dazzle of Turner's sunset, prepared to introduce a showy carpet into
the floor of his portrait. He had laid it in with a flat, bright tint
of vermilion when Turner appeared. 'Oh, ho! Mr. Geddes,' he cried,
and seizing his palette knife loaded on orange, scarlet and yellow.
Returning the next day Turner found that the bright vermilion ground in
Geddes's picture had been converted into a 'rich, quiet, sober-coloured
Turkey carpet.'
Less popular, because it makes no appeal to pathos or sentiment, was
another exhibit of this year, with another of the unwieldy titles,
'Ancient Rome, Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus, The
Triumphal Bridge and Palace of the Cæsars restored,' with this
quotation, obviously Turner's own composition:--
'The clear stream,
Aye--the yellow Tiber glimmers to her beam,
Even while the sun is setting.'
If only Agrippina, with the ashes of her husband and the bodies of her
suite were absent, what a lovely vision this would be with the rosy
bridge, the yellow fairy-like building, and the full moon riding in
the evening sky. Yet why ask to have the figures taken away? They are
Turner; it is all Turner, a glorious Turner, still in the hour of his
splendour, and quite careless of the fact that it was at Brindisium,
not Rome, that Agrippina landed. Northcote, who had a dark subject
picture hanging above 'Ancient Rome,' said, 'You might as well have
opened a window under my picture.' Turner was always opening a window
to a poet's land, which, if it has no earthly habitation, exists,
eternally, in that place where all beautiful things dwell--the
imagination. The Sketch-Books of this period are as crowded with
drawings as the court of Agrippina with figures. In the 'Venice' Book
of 1839 against a water-colour entitled by Ruskin 'Venice: Sunset
sketch with turned edge,' he has appended this note: 'Preserve this
drawing exactly as it is, as evidence of the way he worked; the turned
edge of the paper painted upon.'
The 'Venetian Fishing Boat' also shows the 'way he worked,' when
working for his own pleasure, not for exhibition--green water, violet
hills, rosy buildings held together by the strength of that tawny
sail--lovely.
On a packet which contained a number of drawings in a Sketch-Book, now
labelled 'Miscellaneous,' Ruskin inscribed the following: 'Thirty-four
pieces of paper, some double. Pencil Outline. Rubbish; only worth
looking at for references. It contains many late scrawls of German
scenery. Studies of Germany, etc.'
What may have seemed rubbish to Ruskin, pencil scrawls, etc., may
have been of vital importance to Turner. How these Sketch-Books evoke
the man and the moment. In one of them is 'A Study for a Sea-Piece,'
scrawled on a visiting-card, above the name of Mr. J. M. W. Turner, 47
Queen Anne Street, Harley Street. The number of studies of the sea he
made during his life certainly exceeded the number of visiting-cards he
used.
CHAPTER XLVI
1840: AGED SIXTY-FIVE
A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE TERRIFIC 'SLAVE SHIP' AND THE MILD 'NEW MOON'
What a contrast is the cracked and faded picture 'The New Moon' in the
National Collection, also called 'I've lost my boat, you shan't have
your hoop,' with its sunset sky and young moon, the reflections still
beautiful in the wet sand, to the terrific and impossible 'Slave Ship,'
now in America, with its sharks, its huddle of bodies manacled and
writhing in the water, and the iron chains floating on the surface,
as if they were corks. As Monkhouse justly observes, one of Turner's
finest conceptions is spoilt for the want of a little commonsense.
How opinions differ. Of this picture Ruskin wrote: 'I think the
noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest
certainly ever painted by man, is that of "The Slave Ship," the chief
Academy picture of the exhibition of 1840.' After a long and eloquent
description of the sea, without mentioning the sharks, or the bodies,
or the chains, he concludes: 'I believe, if I were reduced to rest
Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this.'
I will now quote George Innes, the American painter: 'Turner's "Slave
Ship" is the most infernal piece of clap-trap ever painted. There is
nothing in it. It has as much to do with human affections and thought
as a ghost. It is not even a fine bouquet of colour. The colour is
harsh, disagreeable and discordant.' Hamerton suggested that the
opinion of George Innes owes part of its severity to reaction against
Ruskin's eloquence.
Among the other pictures of this year were a 'Venice,' now at the South
Kensington Museum, the middle distance crowded, the creamy towers
beautiful; and the magnificent 'Rockets and Blue Lights,' a tempestuous
nocturne, impressionism run riot, which fetched in the Yerkes sale at
New York in 1910, £25,000, and which was hailed in the transatlantic
newspapers as the finest example of Turner's genius ever seen in the
United States. In this year, also, perhaps later, may be placed 'The
Arch of Constantine, Rome,' that colour dream with the yellow sunset
blazing behind the tree, and the arch looking like a rose red ruin
of the imagination. Mr. Alfred Thornton, who has worked out minutely
the actual topography of this picture, has come to the conclusion
that Turner adhered very closely to the facts, obviously because the
facts happened to coincide with his vision. Of the companion picture,
'Tivoli,' Mr. Thornton says: 'The artist seems to have recorded a
series of impressions he might have gathered during an evening walk
at Tivoli. Scarcely any two parts of the picture are side by side in
nature, yet all can be identified with more or less certainty.'
'The Burning of the Ships,' which is the same size as 'The Arch of
Constantine' and 'Tivoli,' and probably arises, like them, out of
his last visit to Rome, is sheer vision, sheer imagination, perhaps
founded on some recollection of naval warfare, or a vague memory of
an incident in the _Iliad._ It is a fantasy of colour and atmosphere.
To look closely is to see clouds of smoke rising from distant ships,
with suggestions of an arch and buildings, and galleys crowded with
rowers; but Turner was beyond form and definition when he painted 'The
Burning of the Ships'; he saw only the effect of the fire and the fury,
lingering with much loveliness in light.
In 1840 or later he painted many of the water-colours that arrest us by
their beauty in the new Turner Gallery, such as 'The Lake of Lucerne,
from Fluelen,' the large, unfinished 'Lake with Distant Headlands and
Palaces,' and that delight drawing in Mr. Rawlinson's collection called
'In the Vale D'Aosta, a Passing Shower.'
But of all the pictures produced this year the cracked and faded 'New
Moon,' with the sunset sky, and the funny additional title, 'I 've lost
my boat, you shan't have your hoop,' seems to me the most personal to
Turner. He is back in his boyhood at Margate or elsewhere, running
on the sands with little companions and dogs at sunset, when the new
moon was in the sky, and the world was young,--a mild, pathetic little
picture, a strange contrast to the 'Slave Ship.'
CHAPTER XLVII
1841: AGED SIXTY-SIX
HOW TURNER DID IT? HE 'GRASPED THE HANDLE AND PLUNGED THE WHOLE DRAWING
INTO A PAIL OF WATER'
Turner was represented by six pictures at the Royal Academy this
year--unimportant, not one worthy of his reputation. There was a
topographical Venice, which Chantrey bought on Varnishing Day before
he had seen it; and the rather decorative, rather splendid, rather
fatigued picture called 'Depositing of Giovanni Bellini's three
pictures in the Church of the Redentore, Venice,' not one of which
modern expert criticism allows to Bellini. Little that would have
mattered to Turner; he was concerned with the look of the pageant only,
a little confused--gold, red and blue surging in sunlight. No doubt it
pleased the old man to add the name of Giovanni Bellini to the famous
painters who are associated with the descriptions of his pictures.
The titles of the Sketch-Books of this year evoke all manner of visions
of beautiful places and the works associated with them--Lucerne, the
Rhine, Thun, Zug, Goldau, Fluelen, Bellinzona, Como, Splugen and
Grenoble.
In the Salting Collection at the British Museum is a 'Bellinzona' of
the period, faint greens, faint purples, with touches of red, the form
all lost in colour, brooded over by the ridge of snow mountains, the
pencilled line of which has been left. In the possession of Sir Hickman
Bacon is a water-colour simply called 'A Swiss Lake,' the still water
reflecting the rosy hills, and the delicate blues and yellows of the
sky--just iridescent atmosphere floated upon the paper. I look at it,
wonder how it was done, and decide that the explanation by Leitch, the
water-colour painter, told by Mr. Shaw Sparrow in _The Studio_, as to
'how Turner did it,' does not help me.
Leitch informed a friend of Mr. Sparrow's that he once accompanied
Pickersgill to Turner's studio, and there watched the great man
working, or shall I say composing. There were four drawing-boards, each
of which had a handle screwed to the back. After the subject had been
lightly sketched in, Turner grasped the handle and plunged the whole
drawing into a pail of water by his side. 'Then quickly he washed in
the principal hues that he required, flowing tint into tint, until this
stage of the work was complete. Leaving this first drawing to dry,
he took the second board and repeated the operation. By the time the
fourth drawing was laid in, the first would be ready for the finishing
touches; and Leitch was greatly impressed by the commonsense of the
whole proceeding.'
Commonsense and genius, knowledge and daring, cunning and simplicity:
result--Turner's later water-colours.
CHAPTER XLVIII
1842: AGED SIXTY-SEVEN
'THE SNOWSTORM' AND SOME 'FAULTLESS' WATER-COLOURS
I open my thumbed copy of _Modern Painters_, turn to a certain page in
volume I., and read this: '"The Snowstorm," one of the very grandest
statements of sea-motion, mist, and light, that has ever been put on
canvas, even by Turner.'
In this appreciation we can go all the way with Ruskin. 'The Snowstorm'
in its new home in the new Turner Gallery looks the work of a giant in
the interpretation of sea-motion, mist and light.
The 'Snowstorm; Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in
shallow water and going by the lead,' was laughed at by the press when
it was shown in the 1842 Academy. The parody of the title that appeared
in _Punch_ was almost funny; but the old man did not think it funny: 'A
Typhoon bursting in a Simoon over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom, Norway;
with a ship on fire, an eelipse, and the effect of a lunar rainbow,'
with the following skit on the _Fallacies of Hope_:--
'O Art, how vast thy mighty wonders are
To those who roam upon the extraordinary deep;
Maelstrom, thy hand is here,'
Thornbury asserts that the critics of all kinds, learned and unlearned,
were furious when it was exhibited; some of them described it as a mass
of 'soapsuds and whitewash.'
'Turner,' wrote Ruskin, 'was passing the evening at my father's house,
on the day this criticism came out; and after dinner, sitting in
his arm-chair by the fire, I heard him muttering low to himself, at
intervals, "Soapsuds and whitewash" again, and again, and again. At
last I went to him, asking why he minded what they said. Then he burst
out, "Soapsuds and whitewash! What would they have? I wonder what they
think the sea's like? I wish they'd been in it."'
As a matter of fact, Turner had given himself infinitely more trouble
over 'The Snowstorm' than over 'The Fighting Téméraire,' and he had
been in considerable danger. To paint 'The Snowstorm,' he had put to
sea from Harwich in the _Ariel_ in a hurricane, had made the sailors
lash him to the mast, and there the student of sixty-seven remained for
four hours studying the awful scene. I look at 'The Snowstorm' to-day,
and remember. I am filled with awe at the man's power. No, we do not
smile at 'The Snowstorm' now; but certain folk still smile at 'War: The
Exile and the Rock Limpet,' depicting an attenuated Napoleon, standing
against a blood-red sunset, in the shallows of a tidal pool, on the
shore of St. Helena, gazing with folded arms out to sea. Turner failed
to make this nobly inspired dream a reality--that is all.
_Punch_ made merry over the 'Exile and the Rock Limpet,' calling it
'The Duke of Wellington and the Shrimp (Seringapatam, early morning),'
with another parody of the _Fallacies_:--
'And can it be, thou hideous imp,
That life is, ah! how brief, and glory but a shrimp!
(From an unpublished poem.)'
And remarked that:--
'The comet just rising above the cataract in the foreground, and the
conflagration of Tippoo's widow in the Banyan forest by the sea-shore,
are in the great artist's happiest manner.'
'Peace, Burial at Sea of the Body of Sir David Wilkie,' was a vision
which Turner completely realised, the poetry, the pathos, the grandeur,
the decorative splendour--all. The sails of the steamship are dark
against the evening sky, as if in mourning, and amidships, in a blaze
of torchlight, the body of Wilkie is being lowered to his watery grave.
Stanfield, who saw the picture on Varnishing Day, thought the effect of
the sails was 'untrue,' which, of course, they are, but Turner would
not alter them. 'I only wish I had any colour to make them blacker,'
said the old warrior.
From this picture of peace and solemnity I turn to the peace and
loveliness of some 'smaller' water-colours of this, his sunset, period.
Ruskin, in his 'Notes on Turner's Drawings exhibited at the Fine Art
Society in 1878,' which is printed as the Epilogue to the volume called
_Notes on Pictures_, tells how in the winter of 1841-42 Turner brought
back with him from Switzerland a series of sketches, fifteen of which
he placed, as was his custom, in the hands of his agent, Griffith of
Norwood, so that he might obtain commissions for finished drawings of
each.
Ruskin tells us that 'he made anticipatorily four, to manifest what
their quality would be, and honestly "show his hand." Four thus
exemplary drawings I say he made for specimens, or signs, as it were,
for his re-opened shop, namely:--
1. The Pass of Splugen.
2. Mont Righi, seen from Lucerne, in the morning, dark against dawn.
3. Mont Righi, seen from Lucerne at evening, red with the last rays of
sunset.
4. Lake Lucerne (The Bay of Uri) from above Brunnen, with exquisite
blue and rose mists and 'mackerel' sky on the right.
The whole story, which is told in Ruskin's most simple and charming
style, is too long to be repeated here. Nine commissions only could
be obtained, making ten with the one given to Griffith as commission.
'Turner growled, but said at last that he would do them,' and
among them was a 'Lucerne Town,' which Ruskin, by hard coaxing and
petitioning, obtained his father's leave to promise to take if it
turned out well. It did.
What a wonderful realisation of a dream of colour is another
water-colour of this period, reproduced in these pages--'Spietz on the
Lake of Thun, Looking Towards the Bernese Oberland.'
On the last page of the Ruskin Catalogue, which is now called Epilogue,
the old man, most eloquent and most sorrowful, writes:--
'The "Constance" and "Coblentz" here with the "Splugen" (1), "Bay of
Uri" (4), and "Zurich" (10), of the year 1812, are the most finished
and faultless works of his last period; but these of 1843 are the
truest and mightiest ... I can't write any more of them just now.'
About this time Munro of Novar offered twenty-five thousand pounds for
the whole contents of the Queen Anne Street Gallery. Turner hesitated,
but finally refused. Frith, in his _Autobiography_, tells the story
thus:--
'When Munro of Novar went for his final answer, Turner cried, "No! I
won't--I can't. I believe I am going to die, and I intend to be buried
in those two (pointing to "Carthage" and "The Sun Rising Through
Vapour"), so I can't--besides I can't be bothered. Good-evening!"'
The evening of his life was to last nine years, and Turner found his
own way of escape from being bothered.
CHAPTER XLIX
1843: AGED SIXTY-EIGHT
VISIONS OF VENICE AND THE FIRST VOLUME OF 'MODERN PAINTERS'
The two pictures of Venice exhibited in 1843, so changed, so faded,
are in their way among the loveliest things Turner ever painted.
'San Benedetto, Looking Towards Fusina,' was formerly known as 'The
Approach to Venice,' and I wish that title could have been retained,
as one always thinks of it as 'The Approach to Venice,' and always
in connection with the companion picture, 'The "Sun of Venice" Going
to Sea,' with the name of this immortalised, fishing-boat 'Sol di
Venezia' conspicuous on the sail. These two fading visions of Venice
are indescribable, although everybody attempts to describe them. An
eloquent passage may be found in the essay M. de la Sizeranne wrote for
_The Studio_ on 'The Genius of Turner,' from which the following is an
extract:--
'Nothing will be found more beautiful than the "Approach" itself. No
robe from Tintoretto's brush will be found to possess the splendour of
the gondolas conveying us. No Titian--that of the mountains of Cadore,
the presence of which we divine, no nimbus about the head of a saint,
will equal that sun, no purple these skies, no prayer the infinite
sweetness of the dream experienced during those brief, delicious
moments. Nothing will be found to compare with the distant vision of
that city which, on the horizon, seems to be too beautiful ever to be
reached, and appears to recede from the traveller's barque--
_Ainsi que Dèle sur le mer_
gilded like youth, silent as dreams, and like happiness unattainable.'
Earlier in the Essay this sensitive writer says:--
'Turner was the first of the Impressionists, and after a lapse of
eighty years he remains the greatest, at least in the styles he has
treated. That Impressionism came from England is proved by the letters
of Delacroix, and demonstrated by M. Paul Signac in his pamphlet on
"Neo-Impressionism."... Turner is the father of the Impressionists.
Their discoveries are his. He first saw that Nature is composed in a
like degree of colours and of lines, and, in his evolution, the rigid
and settled lines of his early method gradually melt away and vanish
in the colours. He sought to paint the atmosphere, the envelopment of
coloured objects seen at a distance, rather than the things enveloped:
and he quickly realised that the atmosphere could not be expressed,
except through the infinite parcelling out of things which Claude
Lorrain drew in a solid grouping and painting _en bloc._ He shredded
the clouds. He took the massive and admirable masses, the _cumuli_ of
Ruysdael, of Hobbema, of Van de Velde, picked the threads out of them,
and converted them into a myriad-shaded charpie, which he entrusted to
the winds of heaven.'
Time has been cruel to both these Venetian pictures, perhaps cruel only
to be kind. Even in Ruskin's time much of the transparency had gone;
but there they are, dreams of Venice; not the Venice we see, not the
Venice that Canaletto saw, but the Venice that floated before the eyes
of Turner, that blossomed in the imagination of an old man nearing his
seventieth year. I suppose we must call the other pictures of 1843
failures, but only because he tried to express the inexpressible--such
themes as 'The Evening of the Deluge' and 'The Morning After,' with
Moses writing the book of Genesis, mixed up with Goethe's theory of
Light and Colour, and accompanied by an extract from the _Fallacies of
Hope_:--
'The ark stood firm on Ararat: the returning sun
Exhaled earth's humid bubbles, and emulous of light,
Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise.'
In this year, too, he exhibited 'The Opening of the Walhalla,' which
has been banished to the honourable seclusion of the Dublin National
Gallery. This Doric temple, erected on a hill overlooking the Danube,
containing two hundred marble busts of eminent Germans, had been opened
by King Ludwig of Bavaria in the previous year. The idea inspired
Turner; he painted a characteristic picture of the ceremony and sent
it to King Ludwig, who returned the gift with the comment that he did
not understand it. Poor Turner! Munich would be well content to own the
'Walhalla' now.
In 1843 the first volume of _Modern Painters_ was published, which
'originated,' as Ruskin tells us, 'in indignation at the shallow and
false criticisms of the periodicals of the day of the works of the
great living artist to whom it principally refers.' The second volume
was not published until 1846; the third and fourth in 1856, and the
fifth and last volume of this 'enormous work of thought, inspiration,
sincerity and devotion' in 1860.
We have it on the authority of Thornbury, that Turner was vexed at
Ruskin's panegyrics, and said, 'The man put things into my head I never
thought of.' I doubt if Turner was vexed at the panegyrics, but it is
quite certain that Ruskin's imagination saw things in the pictures
that Turner never 'thought of.' Turner was a man of deeds, not of
thoughts. He worked with his eyes, hand, and spirit: he was Nature's
lover. It is certain, too, that after the first irritation felt by his
contemporaries at some of the wilder works of Turner's later years had
cooled, his fame would have steadily increased, and would have been as
high as it is to-day, had _Modern Painters_ never been written.
Neither that wonderful book, nor any other book, could serve Turner.
Only he himself could have produced that fantasy, exquisite and
intelligible, called 'The Seelisberg: Moonlight,' or the study, purple,
gold and blue, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, of a lake, perhaps
Brienz, enclosed by snowy peaks, with the wraith of a castle in the
foreground, and the moon in the blue sky. He went his own way, and
perhaps on the very day that he should have been reading the glowing
periods of _Modern Painters_, hailing him as a sort of superman, he
was the chief actor in that scene on board the old Margate steamer,
watching the effect of the sun, and the boiling foam in the wake of
the boat, and at luncheon-time eating shrimps out of an immense silk
handkerchief laid across his knees. And while he was eating shrimps and
watching the movement of the water, those who had reached the end of
the first volume of _Modern Painters_ were perhaps reading with shining
eyes and lifted hearts the concluding passage about 'the great artist
whose works have formed the chief subject of this treatise':--
'In all that he says, we believe: in all that he does, we trust.... He
stands upon an eminence, from which he looks back over the universe
of God, and forward over the generations of men. Let every work of
his hand be a history of the one, and a lesson to the other. Let each
exertion of his mighty mind be both hymn and prophecy; adoration to
the Deity, revelation to mankind.'
That is Ruskin at his finest: here is Turner at his--well, as Turner.
A Mr. Hammersley, who visited him about this time in Queen Anne Street,
described how he heard the shambling, slippered footstep coming down
the stairs, the cold, cheerless room, the gallery, even less tidy and
more forlorn, all confusion, mouldiness and wretched litter; most of
the pictures covered with uncleanly sheets, and the man! 'his loose
dress, his ragged hair, his indifferent quiet--all indeed that went to
make his physique and some of his mind, but above all I saw, felt (and
feel still) his penetrating gray eye.'
CHAPTER L
1844: AGED SIXTY-NINE
HE EXHIBITS 'RAIN, STEAM AND SPEED,' AND TWICE TRIES TO CROSS THE ALPS
ON FOOT
The Sketch-Books of 1844 tell the happy story of continental rambles,
with flashes of humour, such as this written in pencil against a
water-colour of 'Rockets': 'Coming events cast their lights before
them.'
He is at Lucerne, Thun, Interlaken, Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald,
Meiringen, Rheinfelden and Heidelberg and each book has its numerous
sketches.
To show how unwearyingly this veteran pursued beauty, I quote in full
the titles of the drawings in the short 'Lucerne' Sketch-Book, which
has not been broken up:--
Page 1. Lake and sky. Water-colour.
„ 2. do. do.
„ 3. do. do.
„ 4-9. Blank
„ 10. Lake and sky. Water-colour.
„ 11. do. Stormy weather. Water-colour.
„ 12. The Righi: storm clearing off. Water-colour.
„ 13. A Stormy sunset. Water-colour.
„ 14. The Rockets. Water-colour. Written in pencil in
margin--'Coming events cast their lights before
them.'
„ 15. The blue Righi. Water-colour.
„ 16. The red Righi.
„ 17. The rain, with rainbow. Water-colour.
„ 18. The rainbow. Water-colour.
„ 19. Clearing up a little. Water-colour.
„ 20. Still raining. Water-colour.
„ 21. The rainbow. Water-colour.
„ 22. A gleam of sunshine. Water-colour.
„ 23. Sunset. Water-colour.
„ 24. The Righi. Water-colour. (18 leaves drawn on.)
The exhibited pictures included that masterpiece in impressionism,
'Rain, Steam, and Speed.' Turner's whole life may be said to have been
a preparation for this _tour de force_; all the knowledge that he had
acquired, all the facts that he had accumulated, are used in this
brilliant synthesis of the effect upon the eye of rushing movement
through atmosphere. Has Claude Monet, who acknowledged the impulse he
received from studying Turner in 1870, ever visualised movement, light
and atmosphere in one impression, as did this wonderful Turner in his
seventieth year? But though his power to express a fleeting vision was
at its height in this picture, his ability to express his thoughts
was as stumbling as ever, shown by the following--printed with other
letters by Sir Walter Armstrong in his volume on Turner:--
'47 Queen Anne Street,
_Dec. 28th,_ 1844.
'Dear Hawkesworth,--First let me say I am very glad to hear Mrs.
Fawkes has recovered in health so as to make Torquay air no longer
absolute, and that the Isle of Wight will, I do trust, completely
establish her health and yours (confound the gout which you work
under), tho' thanks to your perseverance in penning what you did,
and likewise for the praises of a gossiping letter, thanks to
Charlotte Fawkes, who said you thought of Shanklin, but you left me to
conjecture solely by the postmark Shanklin--Ryde--so now I scribble
this to the first place in the hope of _thanking_ your kindness in the
remembrance of me by the Yorkshire Pie equal good to the olden time of
Hannah's culinary exploits.
'Now for myself, the rigours of winter begin to tell upon me, rough
and cold, and more acted upon by changes of weather than when we used
to trot about at Farnley, but it must be borne with all the thanks due
for such a lengthened period.
'I went, however, to Lucerne and Switzerland, little thinking of
supposing such a cauldron of squabbling, political or religious, I was
walking over. The rains came on early so I could not cross the Alps,
twice I tried, was sent back with a wet jacket and worn-out boots, and
after getting them heel-tapped, I marched up some of the small valleys
of the Rhine and found them more interesting than I expected.
'Now do you keep your promise and so recollect that London is not so
much out of nearest route to Farnley now ... Shanklin, and (I) do feel
confoundedly mortified in not knowing your location when I was once so
near you, for I saw Louis Philippe land at Portsmouth.--Believe me,
dear Hawkesworth, Yours most sincerely,
'J. M. W. Turner.'
Another blow fell upon Turner this year. The Mr. Hammersley
aforementioned visited him again in Queen Anne Street, and gives the
following account:--
'Our proceedings resembled our proceedings on the former visit,
distinguished from it, however, by the exceeding taciturnity, yet
restlessness of my great companion, who walked about and occasionally
clutched a letter which he held in his hand. I feared to break the
dead silence, varied only by the slippered scrape of Turner's feet,
as he paced from end to end of the dim and dusty apartment. At last
he stood abruptly, and turning to me, said, "Mr. Hammersley, you
_must_ excuse me, I cannot stay another moment; the letter I hold in
my hand has just been given to me, and it announces the death of my
friend Callcott." He said no more; I saw his fine gray eyes fill as he
vanished, and I left at once.'
The loss of friends set his mind dwelling upon the past, and it was
no doubt in gratitude to all he owed to Ruysdael that he painted
and exhibited this year the vivacious sea-piece now in the National
Gallery, which he called 'Fishing-Boats Bringing a Disabled Ship into
Port Ruysdael.' Needless to say, there is no such port anywhere. He
also exhibited the beautiful Approach to Venice' in the possession of
Sir Charles Tennant; and--the old man twice tried to cross the Alps on
foot, referred to in the above letter, which is almost as wonderful
as painting a picture. It would seem that he really succeeded in
the enterprise if 'passed' means 'crossed,' as in the 'Grindelwald'
Sketch-Book, against a drawing of mountains, is the following scrawl:--
'No matter what bef [? befell] Hannibel--W.B. and J.M.W.T. passed the
Alps from [? near] Fombey [?] Sep. 3, 1844.'
CHAPTER LI
1845: AGED SEVENTY
PICTURES OF WHALERS, AND AN ENTRY ON THE LAST PAGE OF HIS LAST
SKETCH-BOOK
Now, when he is nearing his decline, Turner is described as stooping
very much, and looking down. Thinking of Turner 'looking down,' I
recall the story that came to Sir Walter Armstrong from Mr. Stopford
Brooke: how some one who knew Turner, at least by sight, was one day
passing along the wharves beyond the Palace of Westminster, when he
noticed the figure of a sturdy man in black squatting on his heels at
the river's edge, and looking down intently into the water. Passing on,
he thought for the moment no more about it. But on his return, half an
hour later, the figure was still there, and still intent in the same
way. That watcher was Turner, and the object of his interest was the
pattern made by the ripples at the edge of the tide.
Ruskin says that this year his health, and with it in great degree, his
mind, failed suddenly. And to Ruskin we owe this pathetic passage:--
'The last drawing in which there remained a reflection of his expiring
power, he made in striving to realise, for me, one of these faint and
fair visions of the morning mist fading from the Lake of Lucerne.
'"There ariseth a little cloud out of the sea like a man's hand ...
For what is your life?"'
And Turner was going his own way, making his little jokes. On June
31st, 1845, he wrote to Mr. E. Bicknell of Heme Hill:--
'My Dear, SIR,--I will thank you to call in Queen Anne Street at your
earliest convenience, for I have a whale or two on the canvas.'
This letter, of course, referred to the 'Whalers' pictures, exhibited
in 1845 and 1846.
The 'Whalers' Sketch-Book contains drawings of 'Steamer Leaving
Harbour,' 'Burning Blubber,' 'Whalers at Sea,' 'Study of Fish,' etc.
Perhaps he made a voyage; perhaps he talked with sailors in one of his
haunts at Wapping, and learnt from them of the wonders of the deep
waters related by Arctic voyagers. However the idea or the vision
came he now makes sketches of whaling subjects and paints pictures of
'Whalers,' one of which is in the Turner Gallery, four boats' crews
attacking their prey with harpoons, and in the background are the white
sails of their vessels, dimly seen through mists and snow wreaths.
The imaginative 'Sunrise with a Sea Monster' probably belongs to the
'Whalers' period. On the misty waters of the ocean, reflecting a yellow
sunrise, a sea monster, with a head like a magnified red gurnet,
advances, the huge head towering out of the water. In the distance are
forms suggesting icebergs. _Punch_ had a genial sneer at a 'Whalers'
picture:--
'It embodies one of those singular effects which are only met with in
lobster salads and in this artist's pictures. Whether he calls his
picture "Whalers" or "Venice," or "Morning," or "Noon," or "Night,"
it is all the same; for it is quite as easy to fancy it one thing as
another.'
Thornbury is responsible for the following:--
'I am afraid the tradition is too true, that that great and bitter
satirist of poor humanity's weaknesses, Mr. Thackeray, had more than a
finger in thus lashing the dotage of a great man's genius. Long after,
I have heard that Mr. Thackeray was shown some of Turner's finest
water-colour drawings, upon which he exclaimed: "I will never run down
Turner again." But the blows had already gone to the old man's heart,
and it did no good to lament them then.'
In the Sketch-Books of 1845 and 1846, we find him at 'Folkestone,'
'Hythe and Walmer,' 'Ambleteuse and Wimereux,' 'Boulogne,' 'Eu and
Treport,' 'Dieppe,' and back again at 'Folkestone.' In the last of all
the Sketch-Books, 'Kent,' 1845-46, when Turner was over seventy, is
this against a drawing of 'Houses and Church':
'May 30. Margate, a small opening along the horizon marked the
approach of the sun by its getting yellow,' etc.
A little later in this valedictory Sketch-Book is the following in his
own handwriting:--
'May. Blossoms. Apple, Cherry, Lilac,
Small white flowers in the Hedges,
in Clusters, D. Blue Bells,
Buttercups and daisies in the fields,
Oak, Warm, Elm G., Ash, yellow,' etc.
With that utterance of joy in nature we may take our leave of the
Sketch-Books, and of the close of the great period of Turner, thinking
of small white flowers in the hedges, buttercups and daisies in the
fields, seen by his old eyes, and recorded tremblingly in his last
Sketch-Book. There is no sign of trembling in the exquisite vision of
'Tell's Chapel--Fluelen,' his adieu to Switzerland, perhaps the last
water-colour from his hand.
PART EIGHT
1846-1851
THE YEARS OF DECLINE--AND THE END
CHAPTER LII
1846: AGED SEVENTY-ONE
THE BEGINNING OF TURNER'S DECLINE, AND A 'GREY, DIM DRAWING'
The story of Turner's art life really ended in the last chapter: there
is little more to tell, yet 'Queen Mab's Grotto,' which he exhibited at
the British Institution in 1846, flickers with the old splendour. The
sultry arch of trees in the foreground, the golden castle rising to the
sky, have something of the old witchery, and the mundane fairies are
more attractive than many of his clothed foreground fishermen. In this
picture he rivalled nobody but himself, but the suggestion clearly came
from Shakespeare, and it was the old man's pleasure to couple the names
of Shakespeare and Turner in the catalogue, with this from _A Midsummer
Night's Dream_:--
'Frisk it, frisk it by the moonlight beam.'
And this from the _Fallacies of Hope_:--
'Thy orgies, Mab, are manifold.'
The other pictures of this year have the old extravagance of title,
little more. They were:--
'Hurrah for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish!'
'Undine giving the Ring to Massaniello, Fisherman of Naples.'
'The Angel Standing in the Sun,' with quotations from Revelation and
the poet Rogers.
'Whalers (boiling blubber) entangled in flaw ice, endeavouring to
extricate themselves.'
'Returning from the Ball (St. Martha).'
'Going to the Ball (San Martino).'
His ambition was as buoyant as ever, and the look of his eyes as keen;
but his hand was beginning to lose its power. Ruskin has this curt
comment:--
'I shall take no notice of the three pictures painted in the period of
his decline ("Undine," "The Angel Standing in the Sun," and "The Hero
of a Hundred Fights"). It was ill-judged to exhibit them; they occupy
to Turner's other works precisely the relation which _Count Robert of
Paris_ and _Castle Dangerous_ hold to Scott's early novels.'
One could continue indefinitely quoting Ruskin on Turner, ranging,
as he does, through the whole gamut from eulogy to chastisement,
from adoration to grief. Here is a passage that arrests me as I
turn his pages: pathetic, but a wilful misunderstanding of Turner's
temperament:--
'There is something very strange and sorrowful in the way Turner used
to hint only at these under-meanings of his; leaving us to find them
out, helplessly; and if we did _not_ find them out, no word more ever
came from him. Down to the grave he went, silent. "You cannot read me;
you do not care for me; let it all pass; go your ways."'
And here is a wail that is probably quite within the sad truth. In
a note to the first volume of _Modern Painters_, after remarking
sadly that 'Turner is exceedingly unequal,' that he has failed most
frequently 'in elaborate compositions,' and that 'finding fault with
Turner is not either decorous in myself or likely to be beneficial to
the reader,' Ruskin continues:--
'The reader will have observed that I strictly limited the perfection
of Turner's works to the time of their first appearing on the walls
of the Royal Academy. It bitterly grieves me to have to do this, but
the fact is indeed so. No _picture_ of Turner's is seen in perfection
a month after it is painted. The 'Walhalla' cracked before it had
been eight days in the Academy rooms; the vermilions frequently lose
lustre long before the Exhibition is over; and when all the colours
begin to get hard a year or two after the picture is painted, a
painful deadness and opacity come over them, the whites especially
becoming lifeless, and many of the warmer passages settling into a
hard valueless brown, even if the paint remains perfectly firm, which
is far from being always the case. I believe that in some measure
these results are unavoidable, the colours being so peculiarly blended
and mingled in Turner's present manner, as almost to necessitate their
irregular drying; but that they are not necessary to the extent in
which they sometimes take place, is proved by the comparative safety
of some even of the more brilliant works. Thus the "Old Téméraire"
is nearly safe in colour, and quite firm; while the "Juliet and
Her Nurse" is now the ghost of what it was; the "Slaver" shows no
cracks, though it is chilled in some of the darker passages, while
the "Walhalla" and several of the recent Venices cracked in the Royal
Academy.'
How the attacks and parodies of Turner must have pained Ruskin! This,
for example, from _Punch_ on 'Venice, Morning, Returning from the
Ball':--
'We had almost forgotten Mr. J. M. W. Turner, R.A., and his celebrated
MS. poem, the _Fallacies of Hope_, to which he constantly refers us,
as "in former years"; but on this occasion, he has obliged us by
simply mentioning the title of the poem, without troubling us with an
extract. We will, however, supply a motto to his "Morning--Returning
from the Ball," which really seems to need a little explanation; and
as he is too modest to quote the _Fallacies of Hope_, we will quote
for him:--
'Oh, what a scene! Can this be Venice? No.
And yet methinks it is--because I see
Amid the lumps of yellow, red and blue,
Something which looks like a Venetian spire.
That dash of orange in the background there
Bespeaks 'tis morning. And that little boat
(Almost the colour of Tomato sauce)
Proclaims them now returning from the ball:
This is my picture I would fain convey,
I hope I do. Alas! what Fallacy!'
The following pen-picture is no parody. Wilkie Collins told Thornbury
that when a boy--
'He used to attend his father on varnishing days, and remembers seeing
Turner (not the more perfect in his balance for the brown sherry at
the Academy lunch), seated on the top of a flight of steps, astride a
box. There he sat, a shabby Bacchus, nodding like a Mandarin at his
picture, which he, with a pendulum motion, now touched with his brush,
and now receded from. Yet, in spite of sherry, precarious seat and old
age, he went on shaping in some wonderful dream of colour; every touch
meaning something, every pin's head of colour being a note in the
chromatic scale.'
There is nothing sad in that; but who can look at or recall that 'grey,
dim drawing, with one or two specks of light from craft on the river,'
called 'Twilight in the Lorreli,' without emotion? This was one of the
fifty-three drawings that Turner had brought years before straight to
Farnley on his return from the Rhine. Long afterwards, possibly in
this year, Hawkesworth Fawkes conveyed the set to the dreary house in
Queen Anne Street to show to their creator. The old man turned over the
drawings until he came to 'Twilight in the Lorreli.' His eyes filled
with tears, and he muttered, 'But, Hawkey! but, Hawkey!'
CHAPTER LIII
1847, 1848 AND 1849: AGED SEVENTY-TWO TO SEVENTY-FOUR
HE DISAPPEARS FROM HIS OLD HAUNTS, AND IS INTERESTED IN OPTICS AND
PHOTOGRAPHY
Turner's art life almost ceased during the years 1847, 1848 and 1849.
Three old-new pictures only were exhibited: 'The Hero of a Hundred
Fights,' probably an early picture re-touched, and two works of former
years: 'The Wreck Buoy,' which he repainted, spending 'six laborious
days' upon it, and 'Venus and Adonis,' dating from nearly fifty years
before, after his visit to the Louvre in 1802.
The interest of these years, if it be an interest, is centred in his
cunning and successful efforts to escape from the notice of friends
and companions, and to withdraw his private life from any kind of
intrusion. The doors of Queen Anne Street were locked and barred, and
when he was absent from home, which was often, his old housekeeper,
Hannah Danby, had no knowledge of his hiding-place. Sometimes he
was seen at a council meeting of the Royal Academy or on Varnishing
Day, but his friends were rarely able to obtain speech with him.
Hawkesworth Fawkes tried to keep up acquaintance with his father's old
Mend, and every Christmas a hamper arrived in Queen Anne Street from
Farnley. There is a letter to Hawkesworth dated December 27th, 1847,
beginning:--'
Many thanks for the P.P.P., viz., Pie, Phea, and Pud--the Xmas cheer
in Queen Anne Street.'
One day, so the story runs, an artist took shelter in a public-house,
where he found Turner sitting in the furthest corner with his glass
of grog before him. Said the unnamed artist: 'I didn't know you used
this house. I shall often drop in now I know where you quarter.' Turner
emptied his glass, and as he went out said, 'Will you? I don't think
you will.'
The secret of his hiding-place was not discovered until a day or two
before his death. As everybody now knows, he lived mainly, during
those last years, in the little house with the roof balcony facing the
Thames at Cremorne, in what is called to-day Cheyne Walk. The story
current for years was that he passed the house in one of his rambles,
saw that rooms were vacant, liked the place, and after some bargaining
with the landlady, agreed co become the tenant. He asked her name, and
upon receiving the answer, 'Mrs. Booth,' chuckled, 'Then I'll be Mr.
Booth.' This story is incorrect, as he had made the acquaintance of
Sophia Caroline Booth years before, when she let lodgings at Margate.
As it is believed that Turner paid his last visit to Margate in 1845,
it is probable that he transferred Mrs. Booth to the little house at
Chelsea in that year. Her name appears in a codicil to his will, dated
February 1st, 1849, giving her the same provision as Hannah Danby, his
housekeeper in Queen Anne Street, who had entered his service, a girl
of sixteen, in the year 1801. Hannah Danby and Mrs. Booth both survived
him.
Turner's curiosity, his eagerness for wider knowledge about his art
and all that pertained to it, never relaxed, even in this period
of his failing powers. One of the most interesting chapters in
Thornbury's _Life_ is the account given by Mayall, the photographer
of Regent Street, of Turner's interest in optics and photography. I
append portions of the information furnished by Mayall, whom Thornbury
describes as 'that eminent professor in the progressing and wonderful
art':--
'Turner's visits to my atelier were in 1847, 1848 and 1849. I took
several admirable daguerreotype portraits of him, one of which was
reading, a position rather favourable for him on account of his weak
eyes and their being rather bloodshot.... My first interviews with him
were rather mysterious; he either did state, or at least led me to
believe, that he was a Master in Chancery, and his subsequent visits
and conversation rather confirmed this idea. At first he was very
desirous of trying curious effects of light let in on the figure from
a high position, and he himself sat for the studies.... He stayed
with me some three hours, talking about light and its curious effects
on films of prepared silver. He expressed a wish to see the spectral
image copied, and asked me if I had ever repeated Mrs. Somerville's
experiment of magnetising a needle in the rays of the spectrum. I told
him I had.
'I was not then aware that the inquisitive old man was Turner, the
painter. At the same time, I was much impressed with his inquisitive
disposition, and I carefully explained to him all I then knew of the
operation of light on iodized silver plates. He came again and again,
always with some new notion about light....'
Mayall tells us that Turner when he visited him bore the marks of age;
but in the profile drawing of this period, ascribed to Linnell, with
the straggling hair, the powerful nose, and the enormous stock about
his neck, the face is keen, and the artist has quite caught the gleam
of the grey eye. This drawing is not by Linnell, as has been hitherto
supposed, but by Landseer and Count d'Orsay in conjunction. Mr. A. S.
Bicknell, who was present when the sketch was made, contributed to the
_Athenæum_ of January 9th, 1909, the following letter on this subject,
as interesting as it is authoritative:--'
'A few days ago I first saw a handsome quarto "Turner, by Sir Walter
Armstrong, 1902," in which, as a second frontispiece, I found a head
and shoulders portrait of that great artist, described on the opposite
leaf as "from the sketch in water-colours by J. Linnell, in the
collection of James Orrock, Esq."
'During the last fifty years I have occasionally come across a
reference to this likeness, declaring that it was probably the work
of some contemporary painter, sketched at a meeting or private
entertainment; but as these surmises have at length crystallised into
a positive assertion concerning Linnell, I think it may be well to
place the truth on record.
'My father, Elhanan Bicknell, of Herne Hill, frequently entertained at
dinner a large company of the most distinguished artists and patrons
of art, amongst whom Turner, but never Linnell, was often one. It
being the case that Turner objected to having his portrait taken,
on an occasion of that kind two conspirators, Count D'Orsay and Sir
Edwin Landseer, devised a little plot to defeat the result of this
antipathy. Whilst Turner unsuspiciously chatted with a guest over
a cup of tea in the drawing-room, D'Orsay placed himself as screen
beside him to hide, when necessary, Landseer sketching him at full
length in pencil on the back of a letter. Landseer gave what he had
done to D'Orsay, who, after re-drawing it at home, and enlarging the
figure to eight inches in height, sold it to J. Hogarth, printseller
in the Haymarket, for twenty guineas; and it was then lithographed
and published by the latter, January 1st, 1851, with the title of
Turner's mysterious poem, _The Fallacies of Hope_, at the bottom.
Sixteen copies were included in the Bicknell sale at Christie's in
1863. The Louis XIV. panelling of the room, as well as a piano, inlaid
with Sèvres plaques, are indicated in the background; and I may also
mention that I was present at that party, which took place, to the
best of my belief, about Christmas, 1847, or early in 1849.
'Ruskin, who seldom admitted any blemish, even in the person of his
hero, called this portrait a caricature, but it was nothing of the
kind; I knew Turner extremely well, and I have always considered it to
be a most admirable, truthful likeness; indeed, the only one exactly
portraying his general appearance and expression in his latter years.'
So here we have a likeness of Turner in the period of his decline and
disappearance from his old haunts, an authentic likeness at one of his
re-appearances--chatting with a guest over a cup of tea in a Herne Hill
drawing-room.
CHAPTER LIV
1850: AGED SEVENTY-FIVE
HIS LAST FOUR PICTURES PAINTED IN HIDING AT CHELSEA
In 1850, the year before his death, Turner sent four pictures to the
Royal Academy, an heroic attempt on the veteran's part to assure the
world that his power had not deserted him; but these canvases are but
the tottering ruins of his genius, and they have been hung among other
'splendid failures' in the large, lower room of the Turner Gallery.
But, as I have said before, Turner's 'splendid failures' are merely
less great than his triumphs. His 'failures' in the large, lower room
of the Turner Gallery, would easily make a lesser man's reputation.
These four valedictory works entitled 'Æneas relating his Story to
Dido,' 'Mercury sent to admonish Æneas,' 'The Departure of the Trojan
Fleet,' and 'The Visit to the Tomb,' were painted between January and
April, 1850, in a small room, with a small window, in the little house
at Cremorne. We are told that at this window, and on the roof balcony,
he would spend a long time each day studying the ways of the sun, the
effect of light on the river and on the open places of rural Chelsea;
and that he would often rise early, paint for a little, and then return
to bed. Mrs. Booth declared that some of his last work was inspired
by his dreams; that one night she heard him calling out excitedly;
that she gave him the drawing materials he asked for, and that he made
some notes, which he afterwards used for a picture. Mrs. Booth also
confessed that she could not resist whispering in the neighbourhood
that 'Booth' was a great man in disguise, and that when he died he
would surely be buried in St. Paul's. This local gossip was collected
later by John Pye the engraver.
Here I may print, for what it is worth, a letter, that was sent to me
by an unknown correspondent in reference to a small book on Turner I
wrote three years ago:--
'Clapham, _March_ 1907.
'_Re_ Turner.
'Dear Sir,--In the eighties (I think) there resided at Haddenham Hall,
Haddenham, Bucks, a Mrs. Booth, whom it was understood was Turner's
widow. I expressed a wish to look over the Hall, and was received by
the old lady herself (she was a very homely body, and always wore
a big cotton apron). In one of the rooms I recognised a miniature
portrait of the late Dr. Price of Margate. Mrs. Booth said, "Yes! it
was painted by my husband, Mr. Turner the artist; he and the Doctor
were great friends." I also understood that Turner lodged with her
when painting his pictures of Margate.
'When Mrs. Booth died she was taken to Margate to be buried. As I have
never read of Turner's marriage, this may prove interesting.
_'P.S._--The son of the late Dr. Price still resides at Margate.'
In a letter to Hawkesworth Fawkes, dated December 27th, 1850, Turner
wrote: 'Old Time has made sad work with me since I saw you in town.'
But a certain dinner at David Roberts's house shows that old Time did
not prevent him from being merry and sociable after his manner. The
account of this dinner in 1850 is printed in a note to Ballantyne's
_Life of David Roberts._ Turner's manner at the feast is described as--
'Very agreeable, his quick bright eye sparkled, and his whole
countenance showed a desire to please. He was constantly making,
or trying to make jokes; his dress, though rather old-fashioned,
was far from being shabby. Turner's health was proposed by an Irish
gentleman who had attended his lectures on perspective, on which
he complimented the artist. Turner made a short reply in a jocular
way, and concluded by saying, rather sarcastically, that he was glad
this honourable gentleman had profited so much by his lectures as
thoroughly to understand perspective, for it was more than he did.
Turner afterwards, in Roberts's absence, took the chair, and, at
Stanfield's request, proposed Roberts's health, which he did, speaking
hurriedly, but soon ran short of words and breath, and dropped down on
his chair with a hearty laugh, starting up again and finishing with
a "hip, hip, hurrah!"... Turner was the last who left, and Roberts
accompanied him along the street to hail a cab.... When the cab drove
up, he assisted Turner to his seat, shut the door, and asked where he
should tell cabby to take him; but Turner was not to be caught, and,
with a knowing wink, replied, "Tell him to drive to Oxford Street, and
then I'll direct him where to go."'
Sir Martin Shee died this year, and it is said that Turner was
aggrieved that he was not offered the Presidentship of the Royal
Academy. It is difficult to realise Turner in that office this year or
in any year of his life. He was not made for official duties, but to
make beautiful and wonderful things.
CHAPTER LV
1851: AGED SEVENTY-SIX
THE MYSTERY OF THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE REVEALED TO HIS FRIENDS: AND
HIS DEATH
I leaned against the parapet of the Embankment in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea,
and gazed at the row of cosy little houses on the other side of the
road that face the Thames. The house where Turner died, I had been
told, is now 119 Cheyne Walk. My eyes sought 119, but found it not. The
numbers passed from 118 to 120. Then I crossed the road to discover
that Nos. 118 and 119 have been converted into one house. Peering, I
discerned, almost hidden by Virginia creeper, a tablet saying that here
Turner died.
So this was the house. Somewhere near here 'Puggy Booth,' as he was
known to the street boys, 'Admiral Booth' to the tradesmen, moored
his boat. The story was current in Chelsea that he was an Admiral
in reduced circumstances, and Turner was not the man to illumine a
mystery, or end a joke.
We learn from Thornbury that up to the period of his final illness,
he would often rise at daybreak, leave his bed with some blanket or
dressing-gown carelessly thrown over him, and ascend to the railed-in
roof to watch the sunrise, and see the colour flush the morning sky.
There was the railed-in roof, crowning the 'Cremorne Cottage,' that in
Turner's time had green sward to the edge of the river: the house with
three windows only, one in the basement, and one each on the first and
second floors. In the room on the second floor, where he painted his
last four pictures, he died. I remembered what I had read of the talk
of the undertaker's men about the shabbiness of the place, and the
narrowness of the staircase, so circumscribed, that to carry the coffin
up was impossible: they were obliged to convey the body down to the
coffin.
Then my thoughts turned to Turner the artist, the poet in paint, and I
recalled what his great contemporary, Constable, had said of him: that
one of Turner's early pictures, 'a canal with numerous boats making
thousands of beautiful shapes,' was 'the most complete work of genius'
he had ever seen; that 'Turner's light, whether it emanates from sun
or moon, is exquisite'; that 'he seems to paint with tinted steam, so
evanescent and so airy'; and then I repeated the passage about the
golden visions glorious and beautiful, only visions, but pictures to
live and die with.
So I mused, turning from that sad little house, now so cheerful, to
gaze upon the Thames beloved by Turner. He was born near the river; he
chose his rural retreats at Hammersmith and Twickenham because they
were by the banks; and Wapping was the scene of his later jaunts.
Almost his first oil picture, 'Moonlight at Millbank,' was painted
by the riverside; one of his earliest drawings was 'The Archbishop's
Palace at Lambeth.' I rarely pass the wharves south of the Houses of
Parliament without seeing him, as in a vision, squatting on his heels,
and gazing for half an hour at a time at the ripples. The magnificent
new home of his pictures is by the Thames at Millbank, and his last
journey but one was from the Thames: his last journey was to the crypt
of St. Paul's on the hill above the river: there he was rendered to the
mould:--
'Under the cross of gold
That shines over city and river,
There he shall rest for ever
Among the wise and the bold.'
There, in the crypt, he was buried as he desired, by the side of Sir
Joshua Reynolds, and his funeral, as he desired and stipulated in his
will, cost one thousand pounds.
When I returned home from musing before the Turner Cottage, I re-read
the story of the last years of his life, how his hiding-place was
discovered, and so on to the end, and after. The true facts were
revealed through the pertinacity of John Pye the engraver, who 'left
certain memoranda of events connected with "Admiral Booth's" tenancy
of the Cremorne Cottage, and death under its roof, which are of
extraordinary interest.' Pye's memoranda were summarised by Sir Walter
Armstrong in his volume on Turner, partly from a copy made by the late
Sir Frederic Burton, and partly from information supplied to Sir Walter
by Mr. J. L. Roget, through whose hands the whole of Pye's manuscripts
passed.
But first a few words of connecting events before Turner's hiding-place
was discovered. His last appearance in public seems to have been at
the private view of the Royal Academy in 1851: 'he was shaky; he was
feeble; he was no longer the sturdy, dogged, strange being.' After that
appearance, as he had ceased to attend the council meetings, David
Roberts wrote saying how sorry his brother painters were not to see
him, trusting that if he were ill, they would be allowed to visit him,
and promising, that if he desired it, the secret of his dwelling-place
should not be disclosed. Turner made no answer to the letter, but two
weeks later he visited Roberts's studio in Fitzroy Square looking
'sadly broken and ailing.' Turner was much affected by the letter he
had received, and said to Roberts: 'You must not ask me; but whenever I
come to town I will always come to see you.' 'I tried to cheer him up,'
says Roberts, 'but he laid his hand upon his heart and replied, "No,
no! There is something here which is all wrong." Roberts noticed that
his small eyes were as brilliant as those of a child, eyes which some
called grey and some blue. Probably they were grey-blue.
The discovery of his hiding-place was made by Hannah Danby. Turning
over his clothes one day, she found a letter which gave her the clue.
In company with another old woman as old as herself, she went to
Chelsea, and in a shop obtained information that satisfied her as to
the identity of 'Mr. Booth.' She informed Mr. Harpur, one of Turner's
executors, who hastened to Chelsea, 'only in time to find Turner
sinking.' Dr. Price of Margate, an old acquaintanee, was, besides Mrs.
Booth, probably the only other person who shared the secret of his
seclusion. When Turner sent for Dr. Price in the last weeks of 1851, he
was told that death was near. 'Go downstairs,' he said to the doctor,
'take a glass of sherry and then look at me again.' The doctor did so,
but the reply was the same.
Just before his death Mrs. Booth wheeled him to the window to look
upon the winter sunset. He died in her arms, old Turner, old woman,
his head upon her shoulder, on the 19th of December 1851. So passed
the greatest of all landscape painters, weary of men and of orthodox
ways, an old man tired of the fret of life, but not tired of nature,
an enthusiast to the end in his study of light and its brother colour,
and all phenomena, that which is plain to the eyes, and that which
hides. Sentiment was in heyday in 1851, and so David Bogue, who made
the picture of the 'house where Turner died, sent a ray of sunlight
streaming down to the Chelsea room by the river, as if a parent were
smiling on a loving and life-loyal child.
The month following Turner's death, pertinacious Pye, as we read in Sir
Walter Armstrong's summary of his narrative, had an interview with the
owner of the Cremorne Cottage, and was informed that some four or five
years before a lady and gentleman proposed to rent the cottage, but as
they declined to give names and references, it was arranged that the
rent should be paid in advance, and 'the unknown gentleman and lady
became installed in the quiet retreat of their choice.' Some time later
John Pye paid a second visit to Chelsea, and talked with Mrs. Booth.
She appeared, he says, to be about fifty, was 'good-looking, dark, and
kindly-mannered, but obviously illiterate.' She told Pye that Turner
always called her 'old 'un,' and that she called him 'dear,' and that
she first made his acquaintance when he became her lodger near the
Custom House at Margate. She had known him for more than twenty years,
the last five of which had been spent in the Cremorne Cottage. Did any
fires of jealousy break into flame in the bosoms of these two women,
his housekeeper mistresses, Mrs. Booth and Hannah Danby, who knew
Turner so well, and who met by his deathbed?
The following extracts are from an account of the appearance of
Turner's house after his death, given to Thornbury by his 'kind friend
Mr. Trimmer':--
'Backwards stretched a large unfurnished room filled with unfinished
pictures; then a larger and drearier room yet; lastly, a back room,
against the walls of which stood his unfinished productions, large
full-length canvases placed carelessly against the wall, the damp of
which had taken off the colours altogether, or had damaged them....
Then we went into Turner's sleeping apartment; it is surprising how
a person of his means could have lived in such a room; certainly he
prized modern luxuries at a very modest rate. I reserved his studio as
the finale. Often had I seen him emerge from that hidden recess when
shown into his gallery. That august retreat was now thrown open; I
entered. On a circular table lay his gloves and neck-handkerchief. In
the centre of the table was a raised box with a circle in the centre
with side compartments; a good contrivance for an artist, though I had
never seen one of the kind before. In the centre were his colours,
the great object of my attraction. I remember, on my father's once
observing to Turner that nothing was to be done without ultramarine,
his saying that cobalt was good enough for him; and cobalt, to be
sure, there was, but also several bottles of ultramarine of various
depths; and smalts of various intensities, of which I think he made
great use.... Grinding colours on a slab was not his practice, and
his dry colours were rubbed on the palette with cold-drawn oil. His
colours were mixed daily, and he was very particular. If not to his
mind, he would say to Mrs. Danby, "Can't you set a palette better than
this?" Like Wilson, Turner used gamboge: this was simply pounded and
mixed with linseed cold-drawn oil.
'His brushes were of the humblest description, mostly large round
hog's tools and some flat.... Mrs. Danby told me that when he had
nearly finished a picture, he took it to the end of his long gallery,
and put in the last touches.... I next inspected his travelling-box.
Had I been asked to guess his travelling library, I should have said
Young's _Night Thoughts_ and Izaac Walton; and there they were,
together with some inferior translation of Horace....'
'His painting-room had no skylight. It had been originally the
drawing-room, and had a good north light, with two windows.... There
was a small deal box on a side table; my father raised the lid to
show me its contents; it was covered with a glass, and under it was
the cast of the great Turner. Dear old Turner, there he lay, his eyes
sunk, his lips fallen in. He reminded me strongly of his old father,
whom long years before I had seen trudging to Brentford market from
Sandycombe Lodge, to lay in his weekly supplies.'
The _Times_ in the account of Turner's funeral said:--
'Even those who could only sneer and smile at the erratic blaze of his
colour, shifting and flickering as the light of the Aurora, lingered
minute after minute before the last incomprehensible "Turner" that
gleamed on the walls of the Academy, and the first name sought for
upon the catalogue by the critic, artist, and amateur, as well as by
those who could not understand him when they found him, was his also.
Many of the most distinguished of our painters, and many private
friends, paid the last tribute of respect to his remains, and followed
his hearse yesterday, and a long procession of mourning coaches and
private carriages, preceded it to the cathedral.... The coffin bore
the simple inscription: "Joseph Mallord Turner, Esq., R.A., died
December 19th, 1851, aged 79 years."' As the date of Turner's birth
was not given by the _Times_, it was probably unknown at the time.
The date was 1775, and therefore he was seventy-six when he died, not
seventy-nine.
The little, enlarged house in Cheyne Walk is not, like the Carlyle
house in Cheyne Row, a place of pilgrimage. His shrine is the new
Turner Gallery at Millbank. Ten years ago this 'new Turner Wing' of the
National Gallery of British Art was a dream: to-day it is a reality.
Perhaps, who knows, in ten years' time, on the site of Turner's cottage
by the Thames, extending on either side, there may rise that home for
'the maintenance and support of Poor and Decayed Male Artists being
born in England and of English parents only and lawful issue,' which he
desired, which was explicit in his will, and which we, his countrymen,
the heirs of his achievement, have entirely ignored.
PART NINE
AFTER TURNER'S DEATH TO THE OPENING OF THE TURNER GALLERY IN 1910
CHAPTER LVI
VICISSITUDES OF THE TURNER BEQUEST
'In the name of God, Amen. I, Joseph Mallord William Turner, R.A.,
of Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square, in the County of Middlesex,
Esquire, do make and publish and declare this to be, and contain my
last Will and Testament....
Turner's long will, with the complicated codicils which he added to
it, fills eleven closely printed pages of an Appendix to Thornbury's
_Life._ It is a confused and involved document, and the lawyers spent
years and much money endeavouring to effect a compromise between the
contesting parties. Ruskin succinctly summed up the litigation thus:
'The nation buried with three-fold honour, Turner's body in St. Paul's,
his pictures at Charing Cross, and his purposes in Chancery.'
If love governed the world, if we lived for one another, it would have
been quite possible to carry out, at once, Turner's wishes, which are
sufficiently plain, in spite of the muddle of the will. He desired that
the nation should have his pictures, that they should be kept together
in a room or rooms added to the National Gallery to be called 'Turner's
Gallery,' to be built within a period of ten years; that his fortune
should be devoted to founding a Charitable Institution for unfortunate
artists; that provision should be made for Hannah Danby and Mrs. Booth;
that the Royal Academy should be given funds to found a Turner Medal,
and that the testator should have a fitting monument in St. Paul's
and a fine funeral. Turner had revoked his legacies to his next of
kin: they were to have nothing. As Monkhouse justly remarks, the will
was not exactly an unselfish document. Apart from his generosity to
unfortunate brothers of the brush, and his care, no more than his duty,
for his mistress housekeepers, it was devised to perpetuate his own
fame, and to disregard his relatives.
In 1856 the Vice-Chancellor made an order which took the place of the
will. The nation obtained all the works of art by his own hand, and
the Royal Academy a sum of twenty thousand pounds for the Turner Medal
and Scholarship. The real estate went to the heir-at-law, and Hannah
Danby and Mrs. Booth received their portions. The plates, engravings
and copyrights, and the rest of the property, were divided among the
next-of-kin.
In 1854 the removal of the pictures and drawings from Queen Anne Street
to the National Gallery began; in 1856 a final delivery was made, and
in 1858 the catalogue delivered by the assessors, Sir Charles Eastlake,
the President of the Royal Academy, and Mr. Knight, the secretary,
consisted of the following works:--
Finished pictures 100
Unfinished pictures including
mere beginnings 182
Drawings and sketches in
colour and in pencil including
about 300 coloured
drawings 19,049
19,331
Of the oil-paintings thirty-four were almost immediately placed on
exhibition. Additions were constantly made, until by May 1857, the
exhibited works had reached the number of one hundred and five.
That, in brief, is the early history of the exhibited portion of the
Turner Bequest, as given in the preface to the _Inventory._ The whole
history, including the exhibition of a number of the water-colours at
Marlborough House and the Victoria and Albert Museum, would require a
long chapter to tell in detail.
I must now turn to the 19,049 drawings and sketches with which the
name of Ruskin is for ever associated. He has told the story in his
inimitable way in the preface to the fifth volume of _Modern Painters._
In 1857 he received notice that permission had been obtained for him
from the Trustees of the National Gallery to arrange, as he thought
best, the Turner drawings belonging to the nation. 'On which,' says
Ruskin, 'I returned to London immediately.'
'In seven tin boxes in the lower room of the National Gallery, I found
upwards of nineteen thousand pieces of paper, drawn upon by Turner in
one way or another. Many on both sides; some with four, five or six
subjects on each side (the pencil point digging spiritedly through
from the foregrounds of the front into the tender pieces of sky on
the back); some in chalk, which the touch of the finger would sweep
away. (The best book of studies for his great shipwrecks contained
about a quarter of a pound of chalk debris, black and white, broken
off the crayons with which Turner had drawn furiously on both sides of
the leaves; every leaf, with peculiar foresight, and consideration of
the difficulties to be met by future mounters containing half of one
subject on the front of it, and half of another on the back.) Others
in ink, rotted into holes; others (some splendid coloured drawings
among them) long eaten away by damp and mildew, and falling into dust
at the edges, in capes and bays of fragile decay; others worm-eaten,
some mouse-eaten, many torn half-way through; numbers doubled
(quadrupled, I should say) up into four, being Turner's favourite
mode of packing for travelling; nearly all rudely flattened out from
the bundles in which Turner had finally rolled them up, and squeezed
them into his drawers in Queen Anne Street. Dust of thirty years'
accumulation, black, dense and sooty, lay in the rents of the crushed
and crumpled edges of these flattened bundles, looking like a jagged
black frame, and producing altogether unexpected effects in brilliant
portions of skies, whence an accidental or experimental finger-mark of
the first bundle-unfolder had swept it away.... With two assistants,
I was at work all the autumn and winter of 1857, every day, all day
long, and often far into the night.
'The manual labour would not have hurt me; but the excitement involved
in seeing unfolded the whole career of Turner's mind during his life,
joined with much sorrow at the state in which nearly all his most
precious work had been left, and with great anxiety, and heavy sense
of responsibility besides, were very trying; and I have never in my
life felt so much exhausted as when I locked the last box, and gave
the keys to Mr. Wornum in May 1858.'
It would take too long to continue the narrative of Ruskin's labours:
the four hundred cabinets designed by him to contain the drawings; his
privately printed catalogue; the official catalogue; his division,
interesting but bewildering, of the Exhibited water-colours into
groups; his notes upon them, delightful to the dilettante, but of
little service to the student.
The Unexhibited drawings were arranged by Ruskin in three hundred and
eight parcels, and classified by him according to his theory of their
artistic value.
71 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'R,' meaning, right
in intention.
124 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'M,' meaning, middling
value.
108 parcels were inscribed with the letter 'O,' meaning, entire
rubbish.
5 were marked as unexamined.
Never was man less suited to the task of cataloguing, which should be
absolutely methodical and entirely unfanciful, than John Ruskin. In a
letter to the Keeper (Mr. R. N. Wornum), enclosing his catalogue, Mr.
Ruskin referred to the lettering on the parcels as horrible, and added,
'I never meant it to be permanent.'
For long it seemed as if the neglect of the tin boxes, containing the
parcels of unexhibited drawings, would be permanent. Mildew formed on
them, 'the contents of the tin boxes were in a dirty state, with broken
pieces of old sealing-wax, tattered fragments of string, dusty brown
paper, etc., etc.' In 1862 Ruskin, with the assistance of Mr. George
Allen, effected a kind of spring cleaning. 'I've got the mildew off,'
he wrote, 'as well as I could, and henceforth I've done with the whole
business; and have told them they must take it off themselves next time
or leave it on--if they like.' When Mr. E. T. Cook, who, in his book
on the _Turner Drawings_, did so much to arouse public interest in the
'buried Turners,' saw the tin boxes in 1904, the 'mildew was on.' But
the period of neglect of the unexhibited portion of the Turner Bequest
was nearly at an end.
In 1905 Mr. A. J. Finberg was invited by the Trustees of the National
Gallery to classify the '19,049 pieces of paper' chronologically, to
re-arrange the Sketch-Books in order, and to compile a chronological
and descriptive _Inventory_ of all the unexhibited Turner sketches.
Later it was decided to include the whole collection of exhibited
drawings and sketches. The work occupied Mr. Finberg's entire time for
four years, and the result was made public in 1909, when a _Complete
Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest_ was published as
described in Chapter IV. The exhibited water-colours, as well as all
the sketches, are included in the _Inventory._ Perhaps for the sake of
accuracy, it would have been better if Ruskin had never touched the
seven tin boxes. In following the communings of Turner with nature, he
disintegrated many of the Sketch-Books (over 150 were dismembered),
removed a leaf here and there, omitted to number them, gave the
sketches Ruskinian titles, and made the task of re-arranging them in
chronological or topographical order almost impossible. Mr. Finberg
allows himself the following gentle and amusing reproof of his great
predecessor: 'The question of dates had little or no interest for Mr.
Ruskin; on such questions he is, as M. Cherfils grimly remarks, "_plus
que sobre._"'
In 1878, when a selection of nearly three hundred drawings and sketches
were exhibited on the ground floor of the eastern wing of the National
Gallery, the Turner water-colour rooms became a place of pilgrimage;
still more so when additional rooms were added, and the sepia drawings
for the _Liber_ were displayed. The collection was changed quarterly,
and for years many made a point of visiting those little rooms each
time that the change was made. Who did not love the 'delight drawings'?
who did not wonder anew each visit at their beauty? Students copied
and re-copied them, desiring nothing better in life than to sit there,
through long days, trying to follow the Master's vision.
So the years passed. Turner was a classic; his environment was fixed.
It seemed as if no alteration would ever be made in the crowded gallery
where his oil pictures hung, overflowing into the adjoining room, or
in the series of little rooms on the ground floor which we visited at
each re-hanging, greeting the water-colours at each encounter like
the faces, loved and lost awhile, of old friends. It was enough to
know when we missed them, that they would return again, and that the
'buried Turners,' the Sketch-Books with their thousands of pages, each
containing something of the Master's work, were being cared for. Turner
was firmly settled in his niche in the Temple of Fame. It seemed that
nothing more could ever happen to him.
Then suddenly, in the month of May 1906, something did happen:
something that made the art sensation of the year.
That event was the exhibition of the 'unfinished' oils by Turner at the
Tate Gallery.
CHAPTER LVII
1906: EXHIBITION OF THE 'UNFINISHED' TURNERS AT THE TATE GALLERY
The event was heralded by the following paragraph communicated to
the Press by the Director and Trustees of the National Gallery:--
'Unexhibited Oil Paintings; Turner's Bequest. The Turner Collection of
paintings, placed in the custody of the National Gallery Trustees, on
September 25th, 1856, contained, besides the pictures since hung in
Public Exhibition Rooms, or in the Official Rooms at Trafalgar Square,
or lent under the Loan Act of 1883 to Provincial Museums, a certain
number of paintings which, on account of their unfinished or wrecked
condition, it has never been thought possible to exhibit.
'A more careful examination has lately led the Trustees to believe
that some, at least, of these paintings may now be framed and take
their place in the general collection. A selection has been made for
this purpose, and of the paintings selected, many have been relined,
and all are in course of being surface cleaned and varnished.'
On February 5th, 1906, the 'unfinished' oil-paintings by Turner were
exhibited for the first time, in Room VII. of the Tate Gallery. Those
who were present will never forget the occasion. Exclamations of
delight and astonishment were continuous. Few had ever experienced
such a succession of thrills. Everybody was surprised into--almost
into extravagance. The _Times_ began its article: 'To-day the nation
is invited to view some marvellous treasures, of which it has all
unconsciously been the possessor for fifty years,' and quoted the
remark of an artist who was present: 'We have never seen Turner
before.' Another critic wrote: 'The first _coup d'œil_ of the room
in which these treasures are displayed, is one never to be forgotten
for those with eyes for seeing. The rare moment in life has come when
criticism is disarmed. Suddenly, and without warning, the observer has
been transported to the realms of enchantment.'
It was, perhaps, unfortunate that mingled with these 'unfinished'
Turners, these prismatic and pearly visions, these flushes of
iridescent colour on white grounds, were some of the laboured but
magnificent failures of his later years and other periods. Those who
did not know the work of Turner thoroughly had some difficulty in
harmonising the brilliant impulses of his maturity with the ambitious
works of his decline.
I have discussed these 'unfinished' oil-paintings in preceding
chapters; but it may be interesting to place on record here a list of
the titles of the twenty-six unexhibited pictures first shown to the
public on February 5th, 1906. (Two more were added in 1909--'Bridge and
Tower,' No. 2424; and 'A Wreck with Fishing Boats,' No. 2425.)
'Norham Castle, Sunrise.' No. 1981.
'Sunrise, a Castle on a Bay.' No. 1985.
'Sunrise, with a Sea Monster.' No. 1990.
'Sunrise, with a Boat between Headlands.' No. 2002.
'Hastings.' No. 1986.
'The Evening Star.' No. 1991.
'Interior at Petworth.' No. 1988.
'Rocky Bay with Classic Figures.' No. 1989.
'Storm off a Rocky Coast.' No. 1980.
'Margate from the Sea.' No. 1984.
'Breakers on a Flat Beach.' No. 1987.
'The Thames from above Waterloo Bridge.' No. 1992.
'Yacht Racing in the Solent, No. 1.' No. 1993.
'Yacht Racing in the Solent, No. 2.' No. 1994.
'Yacht Racing in the Solent, No. 3.' No. 1995.
'Between Decks.' No. 1996.
'A Regatta at Cowes.' No. 1997.
'Shipping at Cowes, No. 1.' No. 1998.
'Shipping at Cowes, No. 2.' No. 2000.
'Shipping off a Headland.' No. 1999.
'Study of Sea and Sky.' No. 2001.
'The Old Chain Pier, Brighton.' No. 2064.
'A Ship Aground.' No. 2065.
'The Arch of Constantine, Rome.' No. 2066.
'Tivoli.' No. 2067.
'The Burning of the Ships.' No. 2068.
For weeks the appearance of Room VII. at the Tate Gallery had the
aspect of a Private View day at the Royal Academy. Really it seemed
as if art had become popular. The shell of Anglo-Saxon reserve was
broken, and comments of amazement and delight were uttered aloud at
the shimmering light of the sunrise series; at the pale beauty of the
yachting pictures; at the loveliness of 'The Evening Star' nocturne; at
the Monticellian orgy of colour in the 'Interior at Petworth'; at those
irresistible final efforts of his imagination, coherent if extravagant,
the 'Sunrise with a Sea Monster,' and 'The Burning of the Ships.'
Unfinished? A work of art is finished when the artist has said all he
has to say. Turner had no more to tell about sunrises, sunsets, or pale
sails against pale skies. He knew that, and he had the strength to
leave them as they are--unfinished, but supremely realised.
CHAPTER LVIII
1908: FIFTY-TWO MORE 'UNEXHIBITED' TURNERS SHOWN AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY
In July 1908, it was announced that the Director of the National
Gallery had 'discovered' in the private offices, three large
water-colours by Turner. Later in the year, in the month of December,
these, with forty-nine other examples that had never been exhibited
before, were 'cleaned, mounted, framed,' and hung temporarily in
Room XXII. of the National Gallery. This series, although extremely
interesting, was not of the importance of the 1906 display. Some of
the water-colours and pencil drawings, it is said, were found in a
portfolio at the back of a bookcase, and the twelve oil studies in
a dusty parcel bearing Ruskin's initials. Those oil studies, as has
already been explained, were painted between 1805 and 1810 in oil on
thin veneer; the forty water-colours were painted round about the year
1800, and included several of large size, such as 'Derwentwater,'
'Study for a Picture of Norham Castle,' and 'Scarborough Castle' These
'new' Turners remained for some time on screens in Room XXII. of the
National Gallery, drawing crowds of people eager to see so many of the
'delight drawings' and studies by Turner, some of them 'prentice work;
some of the highest importance, but done before he had quite mastered
his material; some flashes of genius.
In 1910 they were removed to their last home in the Turner Gallery at
Millbank, and in that year six more were added to the series--'St.
Catherine's Hill, Guildford,' 2676; 'Newark Abbey,' 2677; 'Windsor from
Lower Hope,' 2678; 'The Ford,' 2679; 'Sketch for Walton Bridges,' 2680;
'Walton Reach,' 2681. Here are the titles of the twelve oil sketches,
and the forty water-colours. The Arabic numerals are those of the
Catalogue, the Roman numerals and letters against the water-colours
are the numbers and pages of the Sketch-Books and Sections in the
_Inventory._
_Oil Sketches_
'Newark Abbey.' No. 2302.
'A Narrow Valley.' No. 2303.
'A Wide Valley with a Town and Spire.' No. 2304.
'The Thames near Windsor.' No. 2305.
'Windsor Castle from the River.' No. 2306.
'A Town on the Thames.' No. 2307.
'Windsor Castle from the Meadows.' No. 2308.
'Tree-tops and Sky.' No. 2309.
'A River with a Castle and Village.' No. 2310.
'Sunset on the River.' No. 2311.
'Windsor Castle from Salt Hill.' No. 2312.
'Eton from the River.' No. 2313.
_Water-colour Sketches_
'View of Windsor Castle.' No. XXXIII. (H).
'Durham Cathedral.' No. XXXVI. (G).
'Derwentwater.' No. XXXVI. (H).
'Head of Derwentwater.' No. XXXVI. (I).
'Langdale Pikes.' No. XXXVI. (J).
'Coniston Old Man.' No. XXXVI. (L).
'Coniston Old Man.' No. XXXVI. (U).
'Rood Screen of a Church, seen from north Transept.' No. L. (A).
'Study for a Picture of Norham Castle' (1). No. L. (B).
'Study for a Picture of Norham Castle' (2). No. L. (C).
'Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.' No. L. (G).
'Donkeys beside a Mine Shaft.' No. LX. (I).
'A Castle seen through Trees.' No. LXIV. (L).
'Windsor Park. The Horses by Sawrey Gilpin, R.A.' No.
LXX. (G).
'St. Agatha's Abbey.' (?) No. LXX. (H).
'The Ford.' No. LXX. (K).
'Study for Historical Subject.' No. LXX. (N).
'Dolbadern Castle.' No. LXX. (O).
'Fonthill Abbey.' No. LXX. (P).
'A Welsh Mountain Subject.' No. LXX. (Q),
'Stormy Sunset in Wales.' No. LXX. (U).
'Falls of Schaffhausen from below.' No. LXXIX. (B),
'Falls of Schaffhausen and Castle.' No. LXXIX. (C).
'Schaffhausen from below the Falls.' No. LXXIX. (E).
'The Source of the Arveron' (1). No. LXXIX. (F).
'The Source of the Arveron' (2). No. LXXIX. (G).
'The Source of the Arveron' (3). No. LXXIX. (L).
'A Road among Mountains.' No. LXXIX (H).
'A Valley Between Mountains.' No. LXXIX. (K).
'Gordale Scar.' No. CLIV. (O).
'Great End, Scawfell Pikes.' No. CLIV. (M).
'Barden Towers.' No. CLIV. (L).
'Head of Derwentwater.' No. CLIV. (N).
'Scarborough.' No. CXCVI. (C).
'An Italian Scene.' No. CXCVI. (X).
'Ruins of an Amphitheatre.' No. CXCVI. (Z).
'Stormy Evening on Coast.' No. CCLXIII. (334).
'A Sea Piece, Evening.' No. CCLXII. (333).
'Carnarvon Castle.' No. LXX. (M).
'Scene in the Great St. Bernard Pass (?).' No. LXXX. (D).
The Turnerian surprises were not yet finished. They culminated in the
announcement that one of the desires expressed by the painter in his
will, namely, that his pictures should be kept together in a building
to be called the 'Turner Gallery,' was at last about to be fulfilled
through the generosity of Mr. J. J. Duveen, afterwards Sir Joseph
Duveen, who offered to add a new wing, comprising five rooms, with
other rooms below, to the National Gallery of British Art, for the
exhibition of the Turner Bequest. It was stated that the whole of the
Turner collection would be removed to this building, with the exception
of such pictures as should be needed sufficiently to exemplify the
Master in the representative British School at Trafalgar Square,
including the two works which, in fulfilment of the terms of his will,
hang side by side with two pictures by Claude Lorrain.
So at last the dream which many of us had been dreaming for years, and
working for in writing and speech, was to be realised. It first became,
I think, a subject of public interest through a letter that Mr. Lionel
Cust wrote to the editor of the _Times_ in July 1906, at a time when
the Government authorities contemplated utilising the vacant land at
the back of the Tate Gallery for a new Stationery Office. The support
given to Mr. Cust's proposals caused the abandonment of this scheme,
and the Director of the National Gallery was informed by the First
Commissioner of Works that if a certain sum of money could be provided
from private sources to erect a Turner Gallery, the Government would
be prepared to find the remainder. Thanks to the efforts of Sir Hugh
Gilzean Reid, this sum was within a near distance of being secured,
when further need for it was removed by the generous action of Mr.
Duveen, who offered to erect a Turner Gallery at his own cost.
In 1907 the nation became indebted to Mr. C. Mallord Turner for a
number of Turner relics. This collection, lent for a period of ten
years, includes two cases of models of ships and a cabinet of glass
jars of colour from the artist's house; an oil-colour box with palette
and brushes; a travelling pocket-book holding cakes of water-colour;
several drawings, and a letter from Turner to his father; the catalogue
of pictures and drawings on exhibition at his gallery in 1809; one
of the original copper plates for the _Liber Studiorum_, etched and
mezzotinted by himself; eight volumes from his library, including guide
and handbooks, with annotations and sketches by Turner; and a volume
of MS. poems, and specimen MSS. of the lectures given by him at the
Royal Academy as Professor of Perspective. Another donation, from Mr.
Sidney Cockerell, was a portrait of Turner by Charles Turner, with an
inscription on the back, stating that the drawing was made about two
months before the death of the sitter, in 1851. It is a profile to
right, head and shoulders, and the official description of the garments
he wears is--'tall hat, white collar, large tie with pin and top-coat.'
In the months of May and June, 1910, the Turner Room at the National
Gallery, the well-known, well-loved room was dismantled, and in June,
the Turner Room at the Tate Gallery was closed, and the 'unfinished'
oils were carried through the doorway of the new Turner wing, now
ready for hanging. A screen was placed before the entrance, but the
visitor looking above the screen had a glimpse of the brilliant red
wall-hangings, and he wondered, somewhat anxiously, how the old dark
Turners would look in their new and gorgeous environment.
The very early pictures have not been admitted to the splendour. They
hang outside the annexe, on the dividing wall separating Room V. from
the Turner Gallery, four on one side of the doorway, four on the other,
examples of the Turner who had not begun to find his way. Some of the
titles suggest light and air, but the execution is heavy and fumbling,
and they are blackened by time. At the extreme left is the little
'Carnarvon Castle' of the year 1800; above is a trifle called 'View
of a Town,' of 1798. In the middle of the group is the huge 'Morning
on the Coniston Fells, Lancashire,' exhibited in 1798, muddled,
inconsequent, almost a libel on the fines from _Paradise Lost_ that
accompanied it--
'Ye mists and exhalations that now arise,
From hill or streaming lake, dusky or grey,
Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold,
In honour to the world's great Author rise.'
Adjoining this blackened 'Morning' is an unimportant, hardly noticeable
'Sea Piece,' painted about 1802.
On the other side of the doorway is the 'Moonlight, a Study at
Millbank,' of 1797, looking like a fog at midnight dominated by a
moon--like a wafer. Adjoining it is the pleasant self-portrait, painted
in 1802 when he was twenty-seven--Turner with the strong chin, loose
lower lip and the observant eyes, gazing straight out at the world.
Next to it is the 'Mountain Scene' of 1800, small and poor, and beneath
is the straightly-seen 'View on Clapham Common,' quite attractive.
Almost pathetic is this wall of timid and indifferent early Turners,
hanging just without the precincts of the superb array of his life
work, but interesting as showing from what insignificant beginnings
rose the mighty edifice. I think if I had my way, I would make the
contrast even more marked, almost epigrammatic. I would hang the little
'Moonlight at Millbank' just above the 'Sunrise With a Boat Between
Headlands,' and the little 'Carnarvon Castle' against the loveliness of
'Norham Castle' at dawn.
Again and again I visited this threshold room, barred by a screen from
the new Turner Gallery. At ten o'clock on the morning of July 18th,
1910, I was there again with an invitation-card to view the 'New Turner
Wing.'
CHAPTER LIX
1910: THE NEW 'TURNER GALLERY' AT MILLBANK
So, at last, fifty-nine years after his death one of the wishes of his
muddled will is almost obeyed--that his works should be hung 'in a
room or rooms, to be added to the National Gallery, and to be called
"Turner's Gallery."'
It would have been better if the new Turner Gallery had adjoined
the National Gallery; but that seems to have been impossible. At
present the exhibited portion is distributed thus: 129 oils and 467
water-colours, etc., at the Tate Gallery; 20 oils and a large selection
of water-colours at the National Gallery; and 31 oils and other works
in the provinces. The Salting Bequest water-colours are in the British
Museum, and there are also many examples, varying from his first to
his last period, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, with several
oil pictures. Besides these there is the unexhibited portion of the
Bequest, and the numerous oil pictures and water-colours in private
and public collections in this country and abroad, making the largest
amount of work ever produced single-handed by any artist.
There is one word only to describe the setting of the new Turner
Gallery, the word magnificent. There are five rooms on the main floor,
and four on the ground floor. The walls of the two large rooms or halls
are covered with a rich Venetian red silk brocade, the walls of the
others are hung with gold canvas.
The first new Turner Room is 34 yards long, nearly 11 yards wide, and
13 yards high. I hardly knew the old, familiar masterpieces. At first
I saw nothing but that gorgeous red brocade, sweeping over the walls,
probably the colour Turner himself used (but certainly in a cheaper
material) in his own gallery in Queen Anne Street. Red may have been
his favourite colour, but we must remember that in his Queen Anne
Street Gallery, the walls were covered with pictures, so that the red
hangings were barely visible.
In the new Turner Gallery the eyes see first the dominating red
walls,--then the pictures. No work is skied. All the pictures are
on the line, arranged chronologically, from the dark 'Tenth Plague
of Egypt' of 1802, to the flaming 'Fire at Sea' of 1834. How well,
sombre but glowing, they all look. Hanging together are those early,
grandiose, masterful canvases, a challenge to the art world of his day,
the 'Calais Pier,' the 'Nelson,' and 'The Shipwreck.' Opposite, on the
line for the first time, is the vast 'England: Richmond Hill,' vastly
entertaining.
At one end of the room hangs the well-loved, cool, and temperate
'Crossing the Brook,' and at the other end, facing it, that mighty
effort of his imagination, 'Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus,' almost
dwarfed, strange to say, by its companions the whirling 'Medea,' and
the flaming 'Fire at Sea.' Here and there are the quieter works,
pastoral and appealing, done in 1809, when his mind was happy and
at rest, the 'Bligh Sand,' and the 'River Scene with Cattle,' so
tranquilly aglow.
The next room is hung with the best of the 'unfinished' oils. The red
silk brocade is almost too overpowering for the aerial loveliness of
the 'Sunrise' pictures, for that magical' Hastings,' with the tawny
sail, and the crepuscular delicacy of 'The Evening Star.' The pearly
'Yachting' series stands the ordeal better, and that glorious riot of
colour, 'Interior at Petworth,' actually flaunts the red brocade. The
old warrior pictures look better than ever--'The Fighting Téméraire,'
the 'Burial of Wilkie,' and that swift foreshadowing of Impressionism,
'Rain, Steam and Speed.' If Turner, mad for fame, as for art, could
have seen these two rooms, one hung with the pictures he did for
exhibition, the other with those he did for joy! If only he could have
had prevision of this year of his triumph!
The other seven rooms hung with gold canvas--just right--contain
a selection of his water-colours, finished and unfinished, oil
beginnings, and others. The water-colours range from the copy of 'Folly
Bridge,' which he made at the age of twelve, to such visions of his
later years, when definition became lost in light, and form in colour,
as 'Ravine and Tower,' and 'The Via Mala,' and certain dreams from the
'Rheinfelden' and 'Heidelberg' Sketch-Books, that one looks at with
wonder and joy, and again with wonder and joy.
There is a room of his early water-colours with two exquisite
interpretations of 'Norham Castle'; there is a room of the sepia
drawings for the _Liber Studiorum_, with a case in the middle
containing twenty-one supreme water-colours, dominated, at the end of
the case, by the 'Venetian Fishing Boat'--a fairy thing flashing green,
blue, and gold; and elsewhere there is a range of his water-colours,
each a treasure; but I think my choice would fall upon 'Sunshine on the
Sea,' everything omitted except--sunshine upon the sea.
On the ground floor, approached by a staircase (on the stair walls
hang three of his colossal failures, 'Waterloo,' 'The Deluge,' and
'Pilate'--do not look at them!--), are four more rooms. One contains
seventeen 'beginnings' of oil pictures, painted about 1807, never
exhibited before in public, but probably shown in his studio in Queen
Anne Street in 1808, to tempt patrons to commission 'finished' pictures
from them. Times have changed. We value beginnings now. Another
ground-floor room is hung with large 'unfinished' early water-colours,
including a lovely beginning in a rosy flush, of 'Coniston Old Man,'
and an atmospheric filmy blue 'Valley with Mountains.'
An adjoining room contains the oils on thin veneer, painted between
1805 and 1810, and first exhibited in 1908. My choice would be 'Tree
Tops and Sky.' And the last room of all, a light, cheerful apartment,
as it should be, includes his last four pictures, painted the year
before he died, and other magnificent failures and experiments. Here
is a picture of the period when he was haunted by the idea of Whalers
in Arctic seas; and when he muddled off a final beauty in despair of
Venice at sunset with a blue sky and ragged clouds; and when he tried
to see 'The Angel Standing in the Sun,' driving Death before him,
Turner then being seventy-one; and other dreams by this amazing man,
whose art vision endured, not only to the end, but became more ethereal
and dehumanised and seer-like as his physical frame shrank and tottered.
All that is over. The immortal part of him remains, and this is the
year of his final triumph, long delayed. He who loved fame and praise,
and spent much of his life pitting himself against his contemporaries
and predecessors, would chuckle to know that his works in the new
Catalogue of the Tate Gallery extend to 144 pages, while all the other
artists represented have but 264 pages between them.
It was almost a shock to return from these golden lower rooms to the
two large galleries on the main floor, adorned with the rich red silk
brocade, that dazzles and distresses. I cannot like these red, flaming
walls, but there is no doubt that the pictures look finer than they
did in Trafalgar Square. Indeed, we seem to see some of them for the
first time. I never realised before what a stupendous work is the
'Snowstorm--Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth, Making Signals.' One
could spend an hour studying the swirl of the waves and the whirl of
the storm, the movement of those deep water waves, and the lights that
gleam in and through them. Incline your head a little to the right, and
there is 'A Ship Aground,' with the tugging movement of shallow water,
the reflections and the gleams portrayed with equal skill. Then turn
your eyes still further to the right, and there is 'Rain, Steam, and
Speed' and the 'Burial of Wilkie.' For some reason or another--the red
walls, or the wonderful lighting of the gallery, or the flame of Turner
that in this year of his triumph spiritualises our perceptions--these
pictures seem to have taken on more delicate delicacies of eolour, new
intricacies of vision.
And what about the 'Interior at Petworth,' that Mr. MacColl has bravely
hung in the place of honour in the gallery where 'The Evening Star' and
'The Fighting Téméraire' dispute for our allegiance? The 'Interior at
Petworth' is a puzzle to almost everybody. I watched a nice father and
his nice little daughter, who had been talkative before most of the
Turners, stand in front of this orgy of colour--dumb. Then the little
girl said: 'Daddy, what does it mean?' And he after a long pause and
another long look said, very seriously, as if he were a little ashamed:
'I don't know what it means, my dear.'
How I longed to say to them: 'Friends, Turner didn't mean you to
know what his "Interior at Petworth" means. He didn't mean you to
see it. It's like this. He was a great artist, almost miraculous,
with extraordinary faculties and power of work, and an ambition,
that was almost a mania, to excel all other painters, living and
dead, and to make the public of his day realise what a mighty man he
was. So he painted his big exhibition pictures, every inch finished,
understandable by everybody, classical, pastoral, homely, heroic--"The
Bay of Baise," "Crossing the Brook," the "Frosty Morning," and "The
Fighting Téméraire"; but that was only half his life. He was mad
about drawing and painting; he never rested; he was always making
experiments, trying to capture the fleeting loveliness of dawn or
sunset, the pomp of high noon, and the splendour of colour in hot
sunshine that to some artists is as intoxicating as wine. He never
meant such experiments, done to relieve his surcharged soul, to be
seen; he never exhibited them. It is we, valuing every scrap from
Turner's hand, who are responsible for their exhibition; it is we who
have brought to the light of day these attempts of the wizard, the old
man mad about art, to force painting to realise what others would have
thought to be unrealisable. They are wonderful. Folk will come from the
end of the world to see them.
'Friends, how that room at Petworth came to be in that awful disarray
I know not. It looks like a nightmare spring-cleaning, with no witness
of the fury but the streaming sun. Turner looked on the sight--that's
certain; was intoxicated by the orgy of colour, painted it in one swift
hour, and having cased his soul, hid his colour-cry, as men hide their
love poems in youth.'
Thus would I have spoken to that nice father and nice child; but while
I was rehearsing my remarks, they had moved on. I sought them, and
found the twain in one of the lower rooms where some of the early
water-colours are displayed, 'unfinished,' because they were painted
for love, not for exhibition, and love had said in them all that love
can say.
I found the father and child standing just where I would like them to
have been--before those two exquisite drawings hanging by the window,
looking, not like paint, but like vapours of iridescent colour--the
rosy flush of 'Coniston Old Man,' and the filmy blue of 'Valley with
Mountains.'
Father and child were silent, but there was something in their eyes
more eloquent than words. Then her hand stole into his and was clutched
tight. My eyes moistened too. For I was looking upon the visible signs
of invisible things. Love made those drawings, and the watchers were
quickened by their loveliness. The father's grasp grew tighter on the
small hand as she blinked away the mist in her eyes.
I should like to have explained, to that nice father and child, the
Sketch-Books, the unseen part of Turner's prodigious achievement,
the studies direct from Nature for his own use, records as he called
them. Throughout his life his procedure seems to have been always the
same--the sketch or the mere note direct from Nature, on which later,
sometimes years later, he based an oil picture, or a water-colour for
the engravers.
He could always, when he had once 'wrenched himself free from the
trammels of topography and antiquarianism,' make a vital sketch from
Nature, but it took him years to master oil-painting. The dark, heavy,
early 'Buttermere Lake' was made from 'a pale and delicately charming
water-colour.' There is not an artist who would not be delighted
to study, in the Sketch-Books, the slight vital suggestions and to
compare them with the finished works--the beginning and the end of his
Hornby, Heysham, Watchet, Boscastle, Bolton; to look at the vigorous
studies from which the 'Bridgewater Sea Piece,' and 'The Shipwreck'
were made, and to swoop down upon that astonishing foreshadowing of
Impressionism, 'Men Chatting Round the Fireplace at Petworth,' made
during the visit to Petworth when he was fifty-five, from which his
dream, world-well-lost period dated: Turner the visionary, who, like
Wordsworth at the end, passed into regions where feeling is almost too
mystical, too rarefied for expression, and indeed can only be expressed
by allusion and suggestion.
The Turner Sketch-Books are as valuable, in their way, as, say, a
discovery of diaries kept by Shakespeare from the day he first left
Stratford to the hour he returned home full of honours and wisdom.
Turner died in hiding--by choice; and, to our great advantage, he
hoarded his Sketch-Books, as he hoarded his 'unfinished' works, meant
only for his own eyes, those gleaming, grey-blue eyes that never lost
their sparkle, and that saw and controlled his hand to paint a 'Ulysses
Deriding Polyphemus 'for fame, and a 'Teasing the Donkey at Petworth'
for joy.
CHAPTER LX
TURNER AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY--AND CLAUDE. A LAST LOOK
Turner has not disappeared from the National Gallery; he still has a
small shrine there. The oil pictures retained at the National Gallery,
with 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' in the place of honour, show an
aspect of his achievement, but not the progressive splendour of his
genius. In this room hang the two famous works by Claude Lorrain.
Every one knows the story, which has been told again in these pages,
how Turner, long before his death, bequeathed 'The Sun Rising Through
Vapour' and 'Dido Building Carthage' to the nation on the condition
that they should hang for ever between two paintings by Claude. Turner
outshone Claude in all other fields, as the sun outshines the moon,
but he never conquered Claude in the particular classical garden
that the Lorrainer cultivated. You may judge for yourself. There
they hang, the two great Claudes, between the two great Turners, an
arrangement sanctioned by the Court of Chancery; there, if the spirits
of the departed do ever visit this earthly scene of competition
and aspiration, these two purified souls should have a gallant and
courteous encounter.
The twain would look gravely at the Turner pictures, and perhaps Turner
would explain, if spirits need explanations, that the supreme work of
his life is not here. But there are some works on the walls that would
make Claude wonder.
Would he not look entranced at Turner's visions of Venice--four
pictures showing how he progressed from topographical facts to
impressions of the city fading in the sea, trailing the loveliness of
her colour with her: from the hard 'Bridge of Sighs,' with the metallic
blue sky, painted in 1833, to the magic 'San Benedetto' of ten years
later, the golden sky flecked with crimson, and the golden pathway
on the sea, an open gate leading to a land that exists only in the
imagination of poets in words and in paint.
Claude would look at this golden path that 'lies o'er the sea
invisible,' and at that other splendour, glorious still, though faded
like the real Venice, called 'The "Sun of Venice" Going to Sea,' such a
sea, such a fishing-boat sailing out from the rose-red city.
Claude would look, and his eyes would glisten, and he would make
obeisance, and acknowledge the supremacy of his companion in these
paintings of the loveliness and mystery of light and colour.
With the other Turners at the National Gallery Claude would feel on
more equal ground, and while looking at 'Ancient Rome,' with the
diaphanous buildings, he might murmur the title of his own 'Enchanted
Castle,'--fantasy arising firmly from fact, not as in 'Ancient Rome,'
fantasy accompanied by uncouth facts.
And Claude would realise the inequalities of 'The Meuse,
Orange-Merehantmen going to pieces on the Bar,' the incomparable
sky, and the grotesque and ill-drawn figures of the fishermen
lolling in their boats; the glory of 'Orvieto,' in the sky, and the
unsubstantially of the figures and the fountain in the foreground; the
force and swing of the sea in 'Spithead,' and the impossible height
of the waves; the loveliness and splendour of the panorama of nature
in 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,' and the futility of the 'party of
pleasure' in the foreground; and--and--the tumbling splendour of 'Queen
Mab's Grotto,' done when the old man was seventy-one, still ambitious,
still ready at a moment's notice to realise the unrealisable.
Turner must explain to Claude, as henceforth officials must explain to
bewildered visitors, that the works at the National Gallery are but a
small part, not very representative, of his colossal life-work; that to
see his achievement in all its astonishing variety, it is neeessary to
descend to the ground floor of the National Gallery, where a selection
of the water-colours is still shown, and where the Sketch-Books are
preserved, and then to make the journey to Millbank, home of the
magnificence of Turner from the sombre masterpieces of his youth to the
golden visions of his maturity--from his early experiments in tinted
drawings to his last flashes of colour lost in light--works that have
made the child who was born in a dark London court of a crazy mother
and a chirpy father--immortal.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Turner's Golden Visions" ***
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