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Title: The Water-Colours of J. M. W. Turner
Author: Rawlinson, W. G. (William George), Finberg, A. J. (Alexander Joseph), Turner, J. M. W. (Joseph Mallord William)
Language: English
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TURNER ***
THE WATER-COLOURS OF
J. M. W. TURNER
TEXT BY
W. G. RAWLINSON
AND A. J. FINBERG
FOREWORD BY
SIR CHARLES HOLROYD, R.E.
MCMIX
OFFICES OF ‘THE STUDIO’
LONDON, PARIS AND NEW YORK
PREFATORY NOTE.
The Editor desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to the following
collectors of Turner’s water-colours who have kindly lent their drawings
for reproduction in this volume:--Mr. C. Morland Agnew, Sir Hickman
Bacon, Bart., Mr. Ralph Brocklebank, Rev. William MacGregor, Mr. W. G.
Rawlinson, Mr. J. F. Schwann, and Mr. W. Yates.
The Editor wishes especially to express his thanks to Mr. W. G.
Rawlinson, who, in addition to allowing several examples from his
collection to be reproduced, has rendered valuable assistance in various
other ways in the preparation of this volume.
ARTICLES.
A Foreword by Sir Charles Holroyd, R.E. page 1
The Water-Colour Drawings of J. M. W. Turner, R.A.
By W. G. Rawlinson ” 4
The Turner Drawings in the National Gallery, London.
By A. J. Finberg ” 28
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Plate I. The Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth. From the
Collection of W. G. Rawlinson, Esq.
” II. The Mouth of the Avon. From the Collection
of W. G. Rawlinson, Esq.
” III. Peterborough Cathedral from the North. From
the Collection of W. G. Rawlinson, Esq.
” IV. The Pent, Dover. From the Collection of
W. G. Rawlinson, Esq.
” V. Distant View of Lichfield Cathedral. From the
Collection of W. G. Rawlinson, Esq.
” VI. Edinburgh: from St. Margaret’s Loch. In the
National Gallery, London.
” VII. Stonehenge--Sunset. From the Collection of
W. G. Rawlinson, Esq.
” VIII. Scarborough. From the Collection of C. Morland
Agnew, Esq.
” IX. Lulworth Cove. From the Collection of W. G.
Rawlinson, Esq.
” X. Goarhausen and Katz Castle. From the Collection
of W. G. Rawlinson, Esq.
” XI. The Lake of Nemi. From the Collection of
C. Morland Agnew, Esq.
” XII. Turin: from the Church of the Superga. From
the Collection of C. Morland Agnew, Esq.
” XIII. The Crook of the Lune. From the Collection
of Rev. William MacGregor.
” XIV. Norham Castle. In the National Gallery, London.
” XV. Launceston. From the Collection of J.F.
Schwann, Esq.
” XVI. Barnard Castle. From the Collection of W.G.
Rawlinson, Esq.
” XVII. On the Lake at Petworth--Evening. In the
National Gallery, London.
” XVIII. Cowes. From the Collection of W. Yates, Esq.
” XIX. Venice: The Salute from S. Giorgio Maggiore.
National Gallery, London.
” XX. Venice: Casa Grimani and the Rialto. In the
National Gallery, London.
” XXI. Lucerne. In the National Gallery, London.
” XXII. A Swiss Lake. From the Collection of Sir
Hickman Bacon, Bart.
” XXIII. Bellinzona: from the South. In the National
Gallery, London.
” XXIV. Bellinzona: from the road to Locarno. In the
National Gallery, London.
” XXV. Lausanne: from Le Signal. From the Collection
of W.G. Rawlinson, Esq.
” XXVI. Lausanne. In the National Gallery, London.
” XXVII. Zurich. In the National Gallery, London.
” XXVIII. The Seelisberg: Moonlight. From the Collection
of W.G. Rawlinson, Esq.
” XXIX. Schaffhausen: The Town. From the Collection
of Ralph Brocklebank, Esq.
” XXX. Tell’s Chapel, Fluelen. From the Collection of
W.G. Rawlinson, Esq.
A FOREWORD BY SIR CHARLES HOLROYD, R.E.
I am particularly glad to write a foreword to this collection of
reproductions of water-colours by J. M. W. Turner, as they are perhaps
the best renderings of the beautiful originals that I have yet seen. The
more reproductions we can have of the master’s drawings the more will it
be possible to study properly his great message, and the more will his
genius be recognised. I would like to see everyone of his nineteen
thousand water-colour sketches and lead-pencil drawings reproduced, so
that we could all hold them in our hands and carry them about with us;
for in them there is an unfailing beauty of composition, and a glorious
truth of effect and of detail, by which Turner managed to make complete
pictures out of even the fewest touches. No one realises Turner’s full
genius till he studies these drawings, often made in the very presence
of nature. They teach us to look at her with a new and seeing eye. Their
absolute truth has hardly yet been fully recognised. I have had the
fortune to carry reproductions of these drawings with me in Wharfedale
and in Venice, and I have compared them touch for touch with nature.
Often and often have I been able to see the meaning of what appears a
careless scratch or even an accidental wriggle, only when the actual
scene was before me. They are mostly drawn from one exact spot, as may
be seen by the crossing of the branches of the trees, although these are
now so many years older, and the folding of the hills. It was in the
seventies that I first made these comparisons in Wharfedale and I still
remember my delight at recognising the gnarled markings on three ash
trees a little below Bolton Abbey; the angle of their growth forming a
rough letter N was identical although they were mere saplings in
Turner’s drawing, and even the broken bank of the river was still the
same, all the winter floods of variable Wharfe not having washed away
nature’s truth to Turner’s drawing. My experiences in Venice are
similar. With the reproduction in my hand I could say that Turner drew a
particular scene from a particular flagstone on the quay, or _piazza_.
The lines of the houses on both sides of the canal cut one another in
the exact way they did in Turner’s sketches only from one particular
spot, but from there the whole scene was complete exactly. Many subjects
were sketched from the middle of the canal and owing to the movement of
the water it was not easy to compare exactly the reproductions with the
scenes in nature. Curiously nearly all these scenes from the canal were
taken from the _traghettos_, or ferries, of which there are several up
and down the Grand Canal, where gondolas wait for hire, tied to their
posts, somewhat as cabs stand in their ranks in our streets. It is
possible that Turner in his economy made use of these waiting gondolas
by giving the gondolier a palanca for permission to sit in a gondola
whilst it was thus at rest. It was an ideal place for working from in
his day, for no “penny steamboats” then splashed up and down the canal
making things rock in their wake, but peace reigned in the reflections
of the palaces.
Only very few of the drawings of which I had reproductions went
unrecognised; one was a view from high up, probably from some room in
the monastery of San Giorgio, and others all contained a view of a tall
tower, which, from the neighbouring buildings, ought to have been the
Campanile of San Marco. But the tower in the drawings had an extra
cornice on the slope of the pyramidal top, with supports below, which I
could in no wise reconcile with nature and which puzzled me for some
time, in fact until I saw the restoration begun on the tower of San
Giorgio. Then I found that the extra cornice and supports were a
peculiar and ingenious form of scaffolding, used for the placing of new
tiles on the steep slope of the pyramidal top--and sure enough when I
got back to London and looked at the original drawing with a glass, the
touches of water-colour indicated the scaffolding quite plainly, and a
wonderful small splash of colour enabled one to realise the angel on the
top, wings and all. I found, too, that all drawings, in which the
Campanile appeared, done by Turner during that visit, gave the
restoration works quite plainly, even when the tower was seen from a
long way off. The beauty of the touches in Turner’s drawings from nature
can only be fully appreciated when the drawing, or a reproduction of it,
is compared with the actual subject, for every bend and movement of the
supple brush means something. It is not possible to convey the drawings
all over Turner’s far-stretching wanderings, but, if only we had good
reproductions of them all, what a pleasure we should all have, and how
much we should learn to appreciate his greatness. I should like to see,
as I have said, every fragment before the public. It is practically the
only way of using our great legacy fully. The original drawings are
perishable things, and must not always be in the light; many have faded
already, let us reproduce them while we may. The slighter sketches
reproduce best, as may be seen in this book. Such drawings as the
_Edinburgh from St. Margaret’s Loch_, about 1801 (Plate VI.), for
example. Note, too, the splendid sketch of _Barnard Castle_, about 1827
(Plate XVI.); how well it comes, we can almost see the brush-marks draw
the forms of the foliage, and the way Turner has used the water; they
are perfect in their way. When Turner worked up a drawing it became like
a lovely flower with a delicate bloom upon its infinite distances, as in
the _Lake of Nemi_, about 1818 (Plate XI.), and the _Crook of the Lune_
(Plate XIII.); they are like a gloxinia or an auricula. This curious
beauty of theirs was often obtained, as it appears to me, by alterations
in the surface of the paper and by colour left in the grain of the paper
after washing out or rubbing down a tone--it alters when the lighting of
the drawing is altered, and its changeableness is part of its beauty.
I should like to see reproductions of the sketch books, made page by
page and bound in similar bindings to the originals, where these exist.
Mr. Finberg has lately put some of these books together again--some
drawings having been removed from the books for exhibition--for purposes
of the very useful inventory of our Turner drawings that he is so
carefully making for the Trustees of the National Gallery. The books are
much more interesting when seen together. I remember one which Turner
had with him in the Lake District and you could trace his itinerary by
turning over the pages. He evidently left Keswick in the morning and
drew two or three views of Lodore and the end of the Lake of
Derwentwater, the hills getting bigger as he comes nearer to them;
familiar views of Castle Cragg and the river come next, and to me some
most interesting views of that wide-spreading mountain Glaramara, some
of them from unfamiliar points of view; but I was able to recognise them
because I have stayed for a month at a time in farmhouses on the lower
slopes, and I have explored that beautiful mountain’s inmost caves.
After this Honister Crag and Buttermere appear in due course. How
interesting it would be to have reproductions of such books and follow
the track of the master page by page. How we should learn to know him
and to see familiar scenes with his eye. We should find that
exaggeration was not the character of his landscape drawing, when he was
working from nature, but insight into the forms. His effects of extra
height can generally be got by sitting low on the ground or even right
in a ditch. From his drawings, from those in this book of reproductions,
we learn again a forgotten truth. Fine drawing, form, is the essential
in our art; great and noble colourist as Turner was, we have had other
fine colourists in the British school of water-colour painting, but it
is just in his drawing and his sense of the beauty and significance of
line that he is supreme. As Titian in Venice excelled the great
colourists of his time, such as Bonifazio and Paris Bordone, so by his
drawing and sense of form Turner excelled as a draughtsman even more
than as a colourist.
CHARLES HOLROYD.
THE WATER-COLOUR DRAWINGS OF J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. BY W. G. RAWLINSON.
What makes Turner’s water-colour drawings so profoundly
interesting--apart from their extraordinary and enduring
attractiveness--is the fact that in them lies before you, plainly
visible, the whole course and development of his art. And the
continuousness and regularity of that development are remarkable. There
are no pauses, no gaps, hardly a table-land; only one steady, continued
progress. No matter how high a point he reached, he was never content to
rest there, but was always pressing onward to fresh achievement, trying
new effects, challenging new difficulties even down to the last years of
his life. To anyone familiar with his work in water-colour, it is
generally easy to date his drawings within a year or two.
No doubt the growth of his art can also be traced in his oil pictures,
but with some important differences. In them, even up to middle life, he
was constantly and strongly influenced by the work of other painters
whom he was often consciously or unconsciously rivalling. First Richard
Wilson, then Van de Velde and Bakhuysen, afterwards Gaspar Poussin,
Claude, Cuyp, Rembrandt, Titian and others, all in turn had their effect
on him. As a result of this rivalry, his oil pictures were less
spontaneous, less sincere than his water-colours. His lack of education
also unfitted him to be the painter of the classical and sacred subjects
in which he attempted to compete with the old masters. No doubt there
were brilliant exceptions--such, for example, as _Mercury and Herse_,
_Ulysses deriding Polyphemus_, and others, but I think Ruskin was
justified in calling many of them “nonsense pictures.” Moreover, in his
oil paintings Turner was constantly experimenting--not always
successfully--both with his materials and his methods and, as a
consequence, many, especially those of his later years, have greatly
suffered with time.
But in his water-colours, after his first years or training and
experiment, he was simply and always himself--he was Turner. Paul
Sandby, John Cozens, Malton, Hearne, De Loutherbourg, and others of the
older water-colour painters, all had their influence on him, but in no
case did it last long. The two men who affected him most were Cozens and
Girtin, his friend and fellow student, of whom more will be said
hereafter. But by 1800, or at the latest 1802, Turner had passed all his
contemporaries, and stood alone, the acknowledged head of the English
school of water-colour painting, which in the-first half of the
nineteenth century was to reach its zenith. Before attempting to trace
the course of his art from its simple beginnings to its glorious close,
a few brief words may be desirable as to his early life and
surroundings.
Born, it is usually supposed (but by no means known with certainty), in
1775, of humble parents--his father was a barber in Maiden Lane,
Strand--at a quite early age he developed unusual powers of drawing. The
barber proudly exposed his boy’s works in his shop window, and
occasionally sold them for a shilling or two apiece; he also showed them
to his customers, amongst whom was Thomas Stothard, R.A., who praised
them and advised him to make an artist of his son. It is impossible
accurately to trace his life before 1789, when he was presumably
fourteen, but it is clear that he had only some brief intervals of
schooling, first at a suburban and then at a sea-side academy--both
probably of the cheapest and poorest middle-class type--in fact he never
had any education worthy the name. He received lessons in drawing,
however, from various teachers, including Malton and probably Paul
Sandby, R.A. At about twelve or thirteen years of age, he was placed in
the workshop of the great mezzotint engraver, John Raphael Smith, who,
like many of his craft, was also a print dealer. Here Turner, along with
his future companion Girtin, was chiefly occupied in colouring prints
for sale, but he also learnt a great deal about engraving which was to
stand him in good stead in after life. After possibly another interval
of schooling, he passed, somewhere about his fourteenth year, into the
office of Mr. Hardwick, a distinguished architect, who employed him in
drawing and tinting “elevations,” adding landscape backgrounds to plans,
etc. It was here, no doubt, that he laid the foundation of the fine
architectural draughtsmanship which is noticeable in his earliest
exhibited works and throughout his life. Long before he had mastered
trees and foliage he could render accurately the lines and structure of
a great building, as well as its intricacies of detail, as, for example,
in the _West Front of Peterborough Cathedral_, which he exhibited at the
Royal Academy a year or two later. Water, also, seems to have presented
comparatively little difficulty to him from the first; owing possibly to
early studies at Brentford and Margate, at both or which places he was
at school. Very few, however, of his quite boyish drawings--I refer to
those before 1790--have survived, and those few are mostly copies of
prints or of works of other artists. One, _Folly Bridge and Bacon’s
Tower, Oxford_ (taken from the heading of an Oxford Almanack), may be
seen in the National Gallery (No. 613 N.G.); another in my possession,
_A Roadside Inn_--the earliest dated work by him (1786) known to me--is
possibly original, but more probably copied from a drawing by M. A.
Rooker, A.R.A.
From the architect’s office, at the instigation it is believed of Mr.
Hardwick himself, Turner in 1789 became a student at the Royal Academy,
and may be said to have definitely taken up an artist’s career. In the
following year, 1790, he sent his first drawing to the Royal Academy
Exhibition, then held in Somerset House. This was the _View of the
Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth_, reproduced here (Plate I.). For the work
of a boy of fifteen, the good architectural drawing, the admirable
rendering of reflected light on the houses, the careful treatment of the
figures (the costumes are quite correct for 1790), and still more, the
effectiveness of the composition are remarkable. There is, however,
nothing original in the style, which is simply that of Malton and
Sandby.
To the next year’s exhibition (1791) he sent two drawings, one of which,
_The Interior of King John’s Palace, Eltham_, is a striking work, of
great originality. Not only has it the sound architectural
draughtsmanship before alluded to, but in its strong _chiaroscuro_, its
rendering of sunlight breaking through the ruined windows and lighting
the gloom, its sense of poetry and mystery, it would be creditable to
any artist of mature age.
A curious phase in Turner’s work of the next year--1792--merits notice.
Influenced probably by the pictures of De Loutherbourg, a French
painter, who had settled in England and had been made an R.A., Turner,
for a few months entirely changed his scheme of colour, adopting a
curious range of greyish and purplish browns as his prevailing tone, in
place of the pale greys, blues, and neutral tints, which, in common with
the other water-colour painters of the period, he had hitherto employed.
In this style are several drawings of Richmond Park, one or two of a
fire at the Pantheon, and many of the beautiful scenery on the downs
beyond Bristol, where, during his early life, he often stayed with
relatives. One, _The Mouth of the Avon_, is reproduced here (Plate II.).
In nearly all the Bristol drawings one special feature is noticeable.
Turner had evidently been struck by the unusual spectacle of the masts
and sails of the tall East-Indiamen, which were daily to be seen in full
sail under the thick woods of the Clifton downs, beating their way up
the narrow gorge of the Avon to the port of Bristol.
Turner continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1793 and 1794. He
sold his drawings readily, and, although I cannot discover any public
references to his work before 1796, he must have attracted notice, as in
1793 he received a commission--his first--for drawings for engraving.
The “Copper-plate Magazine” (afterwards known as “The Itinerant”) was
one of many serials then in vogue which were illustrated by the
water-colour painters--“draftsmen” they were usually called--and in one
of its five volumes he is alluded to as “the ingenious Mr. Turner.” He
is said to have been paid two guineas apiece for these drawings, with a
very small allowance for travelling expenses, it being stipulated that
every subject should be drawn on the spot. With his slender wardrobe and
his painting materials on his back, carrying usually also his
fishing-rod, he tramped the country; he found his way into Kent, across
Wales, through Shropshire and Cheshire, on to Cumberland, and returned
by the Midlands. A reproduction of one of the “Copperplate Magazine”
drawings--_Peterborough Cathedral from the North_--will be found here
(Plate III.). Although on a small scale, it is typical of his work of
this period, and it shows the strong influence on him of his
contemporaries, Rooker, Hearne, and Dayes; yet there is always a decided
individuality of his own. As the late Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse[A] has well
remarked of these early drawings:--
“The great fact in comparing Turner and the other water-colour
painters of his own time is this, that while each of the best of
the others is remarkable for one or two special beauties of style
or effect, he is remarkable for all. He could reach near, if not
quite, to the golden simplicity of Girtin, to the silver sweetness
of Cozens; he could draw trees with the delicate dexterity of
Edridge, and equal the beautiful distances of Glover.... He was not
only technically the equal, if not the master of them all, but he
comprehended them, almost without exception.”
About this time (1793), Turner had the good fortune to attract the
notice of Dr. Monro, the leading Physician of Bethlehem Hospital, who
had a house in the Adelphi, and another at Bushey. He was a well-known
lover and patron of water-colour art, and was in the habit of inviting
promising young students, including Turner, Girtin, Varley, and other
afterwards well-known artists, to his house, where they were given
drawings by Rembrandt, Canaletto, Gainsborough, and other deceased
masters, to study and copy; especially also some recent sketches by John
Cozens, one of the most poetical of English painters, who had just
returned from Italy and Switzerland, where he had accompanied the
millionaire Beckford. The influence of Cozens on Turner was marked and
immediate, and the latter must have made a very large number of
transcripts of the elder painter’s works; in fact, all the very numerous
early drawings of Italian and Swiss subjects by Turner in Indian ink and
blue, which are so frequently to be met with, are copies from Cozens, as
Turner did not visit the Continent until 1802; yet, as I have before
remarked, all show a certain transformation in passing through his
hands. Dr. Monro gave the lads half-a-crown a night and their supper,
and kept their drawings. The training was an admirable one for them, and
when the doctor’s collection was dispersed at his death, it did not
prove a bad investment so far as he was concerned. Mr. Henderson,
another collector and amateur artist, afforded Turner and his companions
similar opportunities of studying and copying the works of older
painters.
From 1793 to 1796 Turner’s advance in power was steady. His subjects
were varied--English and Welsh cathedrals, old castles, ruined abbeys,
village churches, country towns, waterfalls and trout streams--the
latter generally with a bridge and always with an angler. He was himself
a keen fisherman, and his anglers’ attitudes are always carefully drawn
and at once recognisable. Occasionally some striking atmospheric effect,
seen probably on the spot, is introduced. Sometimes the picture is
strikingly enhanced by the play of sunlight, occasionally by boldly
treated _chiaroscuro_. The architecture is invariably drawn with
accuracy and taste, both as regards perspective and detail. His
colouring was a dainty harmony of broken tints in pale blues, greens,
browns, and neutral greys. Many good drawings of this time are in
private collections, and the Print Room of the British Museum contains
some fine examples which have been preserved from light, and are
consequently in perfect, unfaded condition--notably _Lincoln and
Worcester Cathedrals_, and _Tintern Abbey_. Most of the English
cathedrals were drawn by him between 1793 and 1796, including, in
addition to the two just named, Canterbury, Ely, Peterborough,
Rochester, Salisbury, and York; as well as Bath, Kirkstall, Malmesbury,
Malvern, Tintern, Ewenny, Llanthony, Waltham and many other abbeys,
together with castles innumerable--all in the delicate, “tinted manner.”
He also made a large number of studies of boats and shipping at Dover,
one of which is reproduced here (Plate IV.). It was probably there and
at Margate that he laid the foundation of the extraordinarily accurate
knowledge of everything connected with the sea and shipping which
distinguished him all his life.
His works of this early period are usually signed. The earliest
signature known to me is the one alluded to on page 5, “W. Turner,
1786.” For the next few years he signed either simply “Turner,” or
oftener “W. Turner,” occasionally adding the date. In 1799, when he was
elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, he changed to “W. Turner,
A.R.A.,” and in 1802, on receiving the honour of full membership, he
became “J. M. W. Turner, R.A.” A few years later he was appointed
Professor of Perspective to the Royal Academy, and much to the
amusement of his fellow academicians he now sometimes added “P.P.” In
the works of his later life, it is the exception to find any signature.
In Turner’s drawings of this period, as in those of the early English
water-colour school generally, one is struck by a freshness, a
simplicity, a new outlook on nature, which contrast with the works of
the classical painters who since the death of Rubens and the great Dutch
landscapists--Van Goyen, Cuyp, Hobbema, Van der Capelle, De Koninck, and
others--had for a century or more dominated European art. Landscape had
come to be regarded more as a fitting background to classical story, and
although often stately, was always more or less conventional. Now,
Nature was beginning to be studied and painted for her own sake. Yet
Turner, like Byron, throughout his life recognised that natural scenery
_alone_ never makes a completely satisfying picture--always there must
be some touch of the human element, some suggestion of human presence,
human handiwork. This, however, is entirely a different point of view
from that of the classical painters.
From the delicate tints which, up to 1795-6, had characterized the work
of Turner, in common with that of his contemporaries of the English
water-colour school, he passed, almost suddenly, in 1797, to a larger
and stronger style and a bolder range of colour, although the latter was
still limited as compared with the fuller tones of his middle and later
years. At first, in 1796, the pale blues and greens were simply deepened
and strongly accented, as was seen in the superb drawings of _Snowdon_
and _Cader Idris_ which were shown last year (1908) at the
Franco-British Exhibition, and to some extent in the _Distant View of
Exeter_, in the Tatham Sale of the same year. Soon, however, these tones
were combined and contrasted with deep, rich, golden browns. In 1797,
1798, and 1799, Turner sent to the Royal Academy Exhibitions a series of
magnificent drawings of large size, all showing a striking advance in
range and power. Eight views of _Salisbury Cathedral_ painted for Sir R.
Colt Hoare (two are in the Victoria and Albert Museum), the fine _Crypt
of Kirkstall Abbey_ (Sloane Museum), the still finer _Warkworth_
(Victoria and Albert Museum) and the famous _Norham Castle_ (the late
Mr. Laundy Walters), with several others, mark a new departure in his
art. Turner always said that he owed his success in life to the _Norham
Castle_. Thirty years later, when he was illustrating Scott’s works, and
was the guest of Sir Walter at Abbotsford, walking up Tweedside one day
in the company of Cadell the publisher, as they passed Norham Turner
took off his hat. On Cadell asking the reason, he replied, “That picture
made me.” Probably he considered that it was to its influence that he
owed his election as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1799, the year
of its exhibition.
Some recent writers have contended that this great expansion of Turner’s
art was due to the influence of his friend and companion Thomas Girtin,
but they have adduced no evidence to support that theory. Girtin, it is
needless to say, was a very great painter, and his early death in 1802
was a severe loss to English art. And no doubt he and Turner, in their
constant intimacy, must have continually and considerably affected each
other--indeed up to 1795 it is often exceedingly difficult to
distinguish between the two men’s work. But, so far as I have been able
to study Girtin’s early drawings, I cannot discover in those executed
before 1797--the year which witnessed Turner’s new departure--any of the
breadth and boldness which marked both men from 1797 onwards. Certainly
no work of Girtin’s of 1796--the year previous--approaches in force
Turner’s _Snowdon_ and _Cader Idris_, which already in design if not in
colour herald his all-round expansion of 1797.
Nor does the current opinion of that day appear to support the view just
alluded to--quite the contrary. The “St. James’s Chronicle” of 1797,
after praising Turner’s _Transept of Ewenny Priory_ and _Choir of
Salisbury Cathedral_ in the Royal Academy Exhibition of that year, goes
on to remark that, “Mr. Girtin’s drawings in general _appear to be
formed in the style of Turner_.” Again, “The Sun” of 1799 devotes a long
paragraph to the eulogy of Turner’s _Carnarvon Castle_, concluding with
the remark, “This is a drawing that Claude might be proud to own”; it
then praises Girtin’s _Bethgellert_, but prefaces its notice with the
observation “We do not remember to have seen the name of the artist
before the present year. _The drawing is something after the style of
the preceding artist_” [Turner]. Redgrave also effectually disposes of
the question in “A Century of Painters,” 1866, Vol. II., page 402.
Moreover, Turner’s great drawings of 1797, 1798 and 1799 have
characteristics which are not at all those of Girtin. Already there is
visible something of that wonderful delicacy, that sense of mystery, of
‘infinity,’ that indefinable charm which we call ‘poetry,’ which
distinguishes his work--and especially his work in water-colour--from
that of every other landscape painter--work all the more remarkable in
that it proceeded from a man born in a back lane off the Strand, without
any education worthy of the name, and throughout his life unable to
speak or write grammatically--yet withal a man of strong intellect,
keenly ambitious, a reader, and a voluminous writer of poetry.
One drawing only of this period is reproduced here--_Distant View of
Lichfield Cathedral_ (Plate V.). It suffers from the unavoidable
reduction in size, but it is characteristic of Turner’s altered style.
Unfortunately it has at some time been varnished, probably by the
painter himself, as have two others equally important, of the same
period--_The Refectory of Fountains Abbey_ and a replica of the _Cader
Idris_--both of which are now in America. Gainsborough treated several
of his drawings similarly, as did Girtin, Varley, Barrett and others of
the early English school, their object being avowedly to rival in
water-colour the depth and richness of oil painting. But not
unfrequently, as here in the _Lichfield_, the varnish in time
disintegrates the colouring matter and produces a curious _granulated_
look, not unlike aquatint. Indeed, the fine _Fountains Abbey_ just
alluded to was sold not many years ago at a well-known London auction
room, as a coloured aquatint, and fetched only £5.
After Turner’s election in 1799 as an Associate of the Royal Academy, he
exhibited fewer water-colours and more oil pictures, although he was
continually producing drawings, mostly of large size and on commission.
For the next few years his style did not greatly alter, although a
steady growth in power and range is visible. Several large views of
_Edinburgh_ and its neighbourhood, a series of _Fonthill_ commissioned
by Beckford, another of _Chepstow_ executed for the Earl of Harewood,
together with the Welsh castles of _Conway_, _Carnarvon_, _St. Donat’s_
and _Pembroke_, are among the most important. The _Stonehenge_
reproduced here (Plate VII.) is probably the work of about 1803-1804.
He made also during this period a few drawings for engraving, but, with
the exception of the well-known _Oxford Almanacks_, these were chiefly
on a small scale and gave him but little scope; nor was he fortunate in
his engravers until in James Basire, the engraver to the University, he
met with an artist of higher standing. The University commissioned from
Turner ten large drawings for the headings of the _Oxford Almanacks_,
all of which he executed between 1798 and 1804. They are preserved in
the University Galleries, and are noticeable alike for their
architectural draughtsmanship, their admirable composition, and their
general breadth of treatment.
About this time, and also in connection with a commission for engraving,
he was first attracted to that Yorkshire scenery which was afterwards to
have such an important influence on his career. Dr. Whitaker, the Vicar
of Whalley, on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, a wealthy and
learned antiquary, required some illustrations for his forthcoming
“History of the Parish of Whalley,” and Turner was recommended to him,
it is said by a Harrogate bookseller, as a young artist of fast-rising
reputation. It was during this visit that he made the acquaintance of
Mr. Walter Fawkes, the squire of Farnley, near Leeds, at whose
hospitable mansion, Farnley Hall, he was shortly to become a frequent
and an honoured guest.
* * * * *
It is time that reference should be made to the _sketches_, which form
such an important part of the volume of Turner’s work in water-colour.
From the outset of his career, on every journey, he made copious
studies--at first mainly in pencil, but sometimes in water-colour and
occasionally in crayon or oil--of every paintable spot he visited,
keeping usually a separate pocket-book for each tour. The sketches were
sometimes rapid, sometimes elaborate. Especially he made notes in colour
of skies, clouds, water, and any striking atmospheric effects which he
might chance to see. These although often slight, and usually swiftly
executed, were nevertheless singularly accurate. In a pocket-book of
1798 I find twenty-five such, with a list describing each:--_Twilight_,
_Clear_, _Rain Coming_, _Sunny_, _Crimsoned_, _Showery_, _Gathering
after Fog_, and so on. These sketches and studies he continued to make
and to store throughout his life, even up to his last journey on the
Continent in 1845. By the decision of the Court of Chancery, at the end
of a long litigation over his will, they were awarded--nineteen thousand
in all--to be the property of the nation, and after many years delay
they are now being admirably arranged and catalogued at the National
Gallery by Mr. Finberg, who writes on them here. It is needless to say
that to the student of Turner’s life work they are of the utmost
interest and importance, and often--especially the later ones--of
surpassing beauty. The examples which have recently (1908) been placed
on view in the National Gallery are mostly of Turner’s earlier periods,
but one or two belong to quite the close of his life; some are drawings
nearly finished but discarded.
In 1802 Turner visited the Continent for the first time. He was
naturally impressed with Calais, his first French town, and on his
return he painted the well-known picture of _Calais Pier_ (National
Gallery), and the still magnificent but now much darkened _Vintage at
Mâcon_ (the Earl of Yarborough). But it was in Switzerland, Savoy and
Piedmont that he spent most of his time, and the results may be seen in
the fine drawings of Bonneville, Chamounix, and the Lake of Geneva in
various collections, the _Falls of the Reichenbach_, the _Glacier and
Source of the Arveron_, and others at Farnley, and the superb large
body-colour sketches of _The Devil’s Bridge_ and the _St. Gothard Pass_,
in the portfolios of the National Gallery. Three of his Swiss drawings
he sent to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1803.
From 1803 to 1812 he was continually receiving commissions, both for oil
pictures and water-colours, from influential patrons, including the
Earls of Egremont, Essex, Lonsdale, and Yarborough, Sir John Leicester,
Sir John Soane, and other wealthy amateurs. In 1807 he started his
well-known _Liber Studiorum_ in rivalry of the _Liber Veritatis_ of
Claude Lorraine, which had recently been successfully reproduced in
engraving by English publishers. For this he made about a hundred
drawings in sepia--a colour he rarely used elsewhere--as guides for the
professional engravers whom he employed on the work. Nearly all these
drawings, which are mostly slight, are now in the National Gallery.
During the ten years between 1803 and 1812, Turner’s style in
water-colour underwent a gradual, but a very considerable change. He
left the dark blues and deep golden browns which, as we have seen,
marked his first departure in 1797 from the “tinted manner” of his early
days, and he gradually adopted a lighter and more natural range of
colour. This new style is best seen in the work of what is known as his
“Yorkshire period,” which began about 1809, and continued, with various
developments, up to about 1820. His subjects were at first mainly taken
from the neighbourhood of the stately house in the beautiful valley of
the Wharfe which has become a place of pilgrimage to Turner students
from all parts of the world--I refer, of course, to Farnley Hall. Its
then owner, Mr. Walter Fawkes, was up to his death a kind friend and
liberal patron of the painter, who was a frequent visitor at the house,
and retained the friendship of the family down to his latest years.
Farnley Hall is still filled with drawings by Turner of its
surroundings, the neighbouring Wharfedale, important Swiss and other
foreign landscapes, illustrations to Scott’s and Byron’s Poems, studies
of birds, fish, etc. It also contains some important oil pictures by
him. To one series of water-colours--the “Rhine Sketches”--I shall have
occasion to refer later.
Ruskin admirably describes the characteristics of these ‘Yorkshire
drawings’ (“Modern Painters,” Vol. I., pp. 124, 125):--
“Of all his [Turner’s] 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. These drawings have,
unfortunately, changed hands frequently, and have been abused and
ill-treated by picture-dealers and cleaners; the greater number are
now mere wrecks. I name them not as instances, but proofs of the
artist’s study in this district; for the affection to which they
owe their origin must have been grounded long years before....
“It is, I believe, to these broad, wooded steeps and swells of the
Yorkshire downs that we, in part, owe the singular massiveness that
prevails in Turner’s mountain drawing, and gives it one of its
chief elements of grandeur.... I am in the habit of looking to the
Yorkshire drawings as indicating one of the culminating points of
Turner’s career. In these he attained the highest degree of what he
had up to that time attempted, namely, finish and quantity of form,
united with expression of atmosphere, and light without colour. His
early drawings are singularly instructive in this definiteness and
simplicity of aim.” ... “Turner evidently felt that the claims upon
his regard possessed by those places which first had opened to him
the joy and the labour of his life could never be superseded. 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.”
From 1809 to 1820, Turner’s powers were rapidly developing, and he was
producing many important oil pictures, some of which--_The Frosty
Morning_, _Crossing the Brook_, _Somer Hill_, _Walton Bridges_ and _Raby
Castle_--were, perhaps, among the finest of his whole life. He was also
busy with drawings for engraving--chiefly for book illustrations, and
probably for this reason he seems to have executed comparatively few
water-colours for commissions or for sale. One, however, the magnificent
_Chryses_ (Mrs. T. Ashton), which he sent to the Royal Academy in 1811,
calls for notice. It is a large, impressive work, closely resembling in
design the _Glaucus and Scylla_ of the _Liber Studiorum_, but on a
broader and nobler scale; the colour-scheme intermediate between that of
his early and his middle time. What is so remarkable is its
extraordinary _Greek_ feeling. Colour apart, it at once recalls the
scenery and the sentiment of the Greek Islands, although Turner never in
his life saw them. Many will remember the effect which the drawing
produced in the Winter Exhibition of 1887 at Burlington House. Mr.
Morland Agnew’s beautiful _Scarborough_, reproduced here (Plate VIII.),
also belongs to this period.
One of Turner’s earliest series of book illustrations was his “Southern
Coast of England,” which he began about 1812 and continued to 1826. He
agreed with W. B. Cooke, a fine line-engraver and an enterprising
publisher, to supply forty drawings of views along the coast, from the
Nore on the east to the Bristol Channel on the west; many other leading
water-colour artists of the day--De Wint, Clennell, Prout, and
others--being also contributors. Turner was to receive seven and a half
guineas apiece for the drawings, which were of small size; but although
this price was soon raised to ten, and later to twelve guineas, he
became dissatisfied, and broke with Cooke, who, however, judging from
the correspondence, appears to have treated him fairly. He had,
moreover, given him many other commissions for drawings and had held
exhibitions of these, and the engravings from them, at his rooms in Soho
Square.
The Southern Coast drawings are elaborate, highly finished, and in a
rather warmer tone of colour than hitherto. Many are extremely
beautiful, but in some there is visible that crowding of lights and
foreground figures, which from this time onwards is not unfrequent in
Turner’s work. The majority of the drawings are now, alas, so faded as
to give but little idea of their pristine beauty. What they all were
like originally, may still be seen in the beautiful _Clovelly Bay_ in
the National Gallery of Ireland (Vaughan Bequest), and in the _Lulworth
Cove_ reproduced here (Plate IX.).
About the same time, Turner made a fine series of drawings, all on a
large scale, of the beautiful country which lies inland among the hills,
between Hastings and Tunbridge Wells. These were commissions from a
well-known and eccentric M.P., “Jack Fuller,” whose country-seat “Rose
Hall” (now known as “Brightling Park”) lies in the heart of that
neighbourhood. Four were effectively engraved as coloured aquatints, but
were never published; the rest were reproduced as Line Engravings in the
“Views of Hastings and its Vicinity” (afterwards called “Views in
Sussex”), published a few years later. The series remained for a long
time unbroken, but it was dispersed at Christie’s last year (1908). All
the “Sussex” drawings were of the highest quality, sober in colour and
treatment, as befitted the character of the scenery, but the majority
have been badly faded by long years of exposure to sunlight.
Somewhat similar in character to the “Southern Coast” drawings, but a
little later and even more highly finished, is a series which Turner
made in 1818-1819 from _camera obscura_ sketches by Hakewill, an
architect, to illustrate the latter’s “Picturesque Tour in Italy,”
published in 1820. Ruskin, who possessed many of these, ranked them very
highly and frequently alludes to them in “Modern Painters” and
elsewhere. In the “Notes on his Drawings by J. M. W. Turner, R.A.,
1878,” his last important work on art, he describes them (p. 22) as “a
series which expresses the mind of Turner in its consummate power, but
not yet in its widest range. Ordering to himself still the same limits
in method and aim, he reaches under these conditions the summit of
excellence, and of all these drawings there is but one criticism
possible--they ‘cannot be better done’.” By the kindness of Mr. Morland
Agnew, two of the “Hakewill” series, _The Lake of Nemi_ (Plate XI.) and
_Turin from the Superga_ (Plate XII.), are reproduced here.
In 1817 or 1818 Turner began the drawings which were to illustrate one
of his most famous works, the sumptuous “History of Richmondshire,”
which still admittedly remains the finest topographical book ever
published. The subjects--which were chosen for Turner by a local
committee of gentlemen--were all taken from that romantic district in
the North Riding of Yorkshire, on the borders of Lancashire and
Westmorland, of which the town of Richmond is the centre. The work was
to be the _magnum opus_ of Dr. Whitaker whose earlier Histories of
Whalley and Craven had also been illustrated by Turner, and his
publishers, Messrs. Longman, spared neither pains nor expense in its
production. Turner was paid twenty-five guineas each--then his usual
price--for the drawings, which are now worth from one to three thousand
guineas apiece. Although simple in style and in colouring as compared
with the work of his later years, they have pre-eminently the charm of
the ‘Yorkshire period’ already alluded to. The finest of the series,
_The Crook of the Lune_, is, by the courtesy of its owner, the Rev. W.
MacGregor, reproduced here (Plate XIII.). The necessary reduction in
size makes it difficult fully to appreciate the great beauty of this
drawing, which I regard as one of the most consummate works of Turner.
Although it must have been, one would imagine, a most intricate and
difficult subject for a painter, and notwithstanding that he has treated
it with extraordinary minuteness of detail--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. The other “Richmondshire” drawings are scattered in various
collections; many, alas, are sadly faded from constant exposure to
light, notably the _Hornby Castle_, in the Victoria and Albert Museum,
which has become a complete wreck.
May I be permitted here to draw attention to the fact--apparently little
known, but none the less true--that, with the exception of some of the
darker early works, _no Turner drawing can be continuously exposed
unprotected to light, without its ruin being eventually only a question
of time_. The more delicate--the more “Turneresque” it is--the quicker
will that ruin be accomplished. Usually the fading is so gradual that
it is unnoticed by the owner, but it is certain, and, it need not be
added, the depreciation in value is equally certain. I would refer
anyone who thinks this an over-statement to the Blue Book on the
subject, published in 1888 (Report of the Science and Art Department on
the Action of Light on Water-Colours. H.M. Stationery Office, 1888).
Several striking object lessons of the effect of exposure may also be
seen at the National Gallery in Turner drawings which have been returned
after exhibition in provincial Galleries.
Up to about 1830, Turner’s finished drawings were mainly in transparent
water-colour, but from a quite early period he employed body-colour in
his sketches, especially whenever speed was necessary. “Body-colour,” it
need hardly be said, is ordinary paint mixed with Chinese white or some
other opaque white substance in place of water, and is frequently used
on a grey or neutral coloured paper, by which means the work is much
more rapid. He had recourse to that method on one memorable occasion. In
1817 he went for a three weeks’ tour in the Rhine district, and during
that time produced no less than fifty drawings of fair size, _i.e._, at
the rate of about three a day. He first 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. When he returned to
England he took the drawings in a roll straight to Farnley Hall, and Mr.
Fawkes, to his delight, bought them at once for £500. For a long time
they remained in a portfolio unbroken, one of the treasures of the
house, but a few years ago some were dispersed at Christie’s. One of
these, _Goarhausen and Katz Castle_, is reproduced here (Plate X.).
In 1818 Turner went North to make drawings for “The Provincial
Antiquities of Scotland,” an important illustrated work in which Sir
Walter Scott, then in the height of his Waverley fame, was keenly
interested, and for which he was gratuitously writing the letterpress.
Sir Walter wished the illustrations to be given to a fellow Scotsman,
the Rev. John Thomson, of Duddingston, an able landscape painter, but
the publishers insisted that Turner’s was the name in vogue with the
public, and the work was accordingly divided. The drawings, which are
all highly finished and of fine quality, are entirely of Lowland
scenery, including _Bothwell_, _Crichton_, and _Roslyn_ castles, three
or four Edinburgh subjects--one, _Edinburgh from the Calton Hill_, very
striking--and the seaside fortresses of _Tantallon_ and _Dunbar_. They
were afterwards presented by the publishers to Sir Walter in recognition
of his services in ensuring the success of the book, and they remained
at Abbotsford until quite recent years.
In 1819 Turner paid his first visit to Rome, and remained there some
time, going a good deal into English society at the Embassy and
elsewhere. He painted a few oil pictures, but not many water-colours;
among the most interesting is a fine series of studies in the Campagna,
most of which are in the National Gallery. (The “Hakewill” drawings of
Rome were probably all finished before he left England.)
His visit to Rome would appear on the whole to have unfavourably
affected his art. His oil paintings especially, from this time began to
be more and more fantastic in subject, florid in colour, and complicated
in design. No doubt there are brilliant exceptions, such as _Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage_, and others, but the old simplicity and sobriety
had gone. In the water-colours also the tendency to “foxiness” and
florid colour is noticeable, although not so pronounced; it is visible
in the Campagna sketches just alluded to. The change was soon recognised
by his admirers. In 1820 (the year following), I find in the “Annals of
the Fine Arts” the following discriminating criticism of an exhibition
of his works which was held that year at the town house of Mr. Fawkes of
Farnley:--
“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.”
From 1820 until about 1840, apart from his sketches, Turner’s work in
water-colour was almost entirely for engraving. This entailed a great
demand on his time, as he invariably also supervised the execution of
each engraving. Proof after proof had to be submitted to him, to be
returned by him again and again, touched, scraped, and drawn upon for
correction, before he would pass it. As he had an intimate knowledge of
the engravers’ technical processes and always took pains to explain to
them his _reasons_ for the alterations which he required, he gradually
educated them to understand his aims and methods, and so stimulated
their ambition, that the best of their plates mark probably the highest
point which landscape engraving in line has ever touched. I refer
especially to those of “The Southern Coast,” Rogers’s “Poems” and
“Italy,” “Byron’s Works,” “Scott’s Poetical and Prose Works,” and
“Picturesque Views in England and Wales.”
In 1824 we find Turner at work on the well-known “Rivers of England,”
the drawings for which, along with its companion series “The Ports of
England,” have for so many years--too many, alas, for their
welfare--been exposed for long periods and daily copied at the National
Gallery. These show a richer and more elaborate colour-scheme, as
compared with the simpler work of the “Yorkshire” period. An example,
the _Norham Castle_ (No. XIV.), is given here. Both series were well
reproduced in mezzotint on steel, which metal had just begun to
supersede copper for engraving.
In 1826 he commenced what was to have been his _magnum opus_ in line
engraving--his “Picturesque Views in England and Wales.” 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. Two of the series are represented here--Mr. Schwann’s
beautiful _Launceston_ (Plate XV.) is the earlier (1827); the striking
and very attractive _Cowes_ (Plate XVIII.), belonging to Mr. Yates, is a
few years later. Turner was paid at the rate of sixty to seventy guineas
apiece--to-day they are worth from one thousand to two thousand five
hundred guineas each.
A new phase in his water-colour art of 1830-1836 calls for notice, viz.,
his numerous small drawings for _vignette_ illustrations, the first and
the most important of which were for the far-famed plates of Rogers’s
“Poems” and “Italy.” The drawings for these are markedly different from
any of his previous work, and many of them strike what I cannot but
regard as an unpleasant note. Marvels of execution, delicate, highly
imaginative, and poetical in feeling as they are, they are often
strangely forced and extravagant in _colour_. And this applies to nearly
all his drawings for _vignettes_. Probably his reason for thus
falsifying his colour was connected with the form of engraving, as at
the same time he was producing some of his finest and sanest work for
the “England and Wales,” “Turner’s Annual Tours” (now better known as
the “Rivers of France”) and other engravings of ordinary (not vignette)
shape. Whatever may have been his motive, it appears to me that owing
to this unnatural colouring, the exquisitely engraved vignettes
themselves are in many cases finer than the drawings for them.
Many, however, of the small drawings of this time are superb, including
several of those on grey paper. In the “Rivers of France” series,
_Jumièges_, _Caudebec_, _Saint Denis_, _Rouen from St. Catherine’s
Hill_, and _The Light Towers of the Hêve_ (all in the National Gallery),
are masterpieces, as are also many of the illustrations to “Scott’s
Poetical and Prose Works.” In Turner’s later years he frequently did not
sell his drawings for engravings, but lent them to the publishers,
charging usually five to seven guineas apiece. He kept many in his
possession up to his death, as he did nearly the whole of his sketches.
One day he brought the sixty drawings for the “Rivers of France” to
Ruskin, rolled in dirty brown paper, offering them to him for
twenty-five guineas apiece. To Ruskin’s grief he could not induce his
father to spend the money. In later years he tells us he had to pay
£1,000 for the seventeen which he gave to Oxford!
A long succession of books were illustrated by Turner between 1830 and
1836, containing in all nearly three hundred and fifty plates, mostly of
small size. When it is remembered that he also closely supervised the
smallest details in the engraving of each one, and that at the same time
he was engaged on a number of oil pictures of the highest importance
many of which were finished and exhibited, and others left in various
stages of completion (including most of those recently added to the Tate
Gallery), it may be doubted if such a volume of work was ever before
produced in six years by any painter. With 1838, however, his work for
the engravers practically came to an end. He was now a rich man and able
to refuse tempting offers for the pictures which he had determined to
leave to the nation; as for example his _Old Téméraire_, which a wealthy
Midland manufacturer is said to have offered to cover with sovereigns.
From 1838 to 1845, when his health began to fail, he spent an increasing
time each year on the Continent, and it was during this period that his
water-colour art passed into what many regard as its highest, as it was
its latest phase. I refer especially to the magnificent _Sketches_ of
this time, the large majority of which are in the National Gallery. He
revisited Venice, which had cast her enchantment on him in earlier
years, and he returned again and again to the Lake of Lucerne, which,
after Yorkshire, was probably, up to the last, of all places in the
world the dearest to his heart. It would be difficult to say how many
times he drew the town, the lake, the mountains, and especially the
Righi. There are the _Red Righi_, the _Blue Righi_, the _Dark Righi_,
the _Pale Righi_, and a hundred other versions--each different, each a
‘vision of delight.’ He made drawings also in many neighbouring parts
of Switzerland, Piedmont, and Savoy.
The sketches and drawings of this period have all the old delicacy,
combined with a greater breadth of treatment, and an amazing wealth and
range of colour. Sixty years’ experience had given Turner’s hand--which
up to the very last retained its extraordinary delicacy and certainty--a
marvellous cunning. In many cases the drawings were swiftly painted, in
others carefully stippled in details; usually with a dry brush worked
over body-colour. Sir Hickman Bacon’s beautiful _Swiss Lake_ (Plate
XXII.), _Lausanne_ (Plate XXV.), _The Seelisberg, Moonlight_ (Plate
XXVIII.), Mr. Ralph Brocklebank’s highly finished _Schaffhausen_ (Plate
XXIX.), and _Tell’s Chapel, Fluelen_ (Plate XXX.)--which Ruskin believed
to be Turner’s last sketch on the Continent--along with most of the
reproductions from the National Gallery, are examples of this time.
This last phase of Turner’s art was, however, at the time neither
understood nor appreciated, probably owing largely to the new
development which had recently taken place in his oil pictures. In these
he had set himself, in his old age, the last and hardest tasks of his
life--the painting of pure light, of swift movement, of the tumultuous,
elemental forces of Nature. Some of the _Venice_ subjects, the
marvellous _Snow Storm at Sea_, and the _Rain, Steam and Speed_, were
entirely misunderstood and ridiculed. “Blackwood’s Magazine” led the
attack, and “Punch” and Thackeray added their satire. No doubt several
of his late oil pictures were far-fetched in subject, fantastic in
treatment, and eccentric in colour. Probably, also, no one knew better
than he that he had not reached the goal of his ambition; but he also
knew that his critics understood his aims as little as they did the
difficulties which he had to encounter in striving to reach them, and
the old man felt the attacks keenly. Ruskin tells us that he came one
evening to his father’s house in Denmark Hill, after an especially
bitter onslaught on the _Snow Storm at Sea--Vessel in Distress off
Harwich_, of 1842, which the critics had described as “soapsuds and
whitewash.” Ruskin heard him, sitting in his chair by the fire,
muttering to himself at intervals “Soapsuds and whitewash,” again and
again and again. “At last,” he says, “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 actually been on board the
boat at the time lashed to the mast, at the risk of his life.
Nor has the work of his later years always been understood in our days.
Not many years ago a distinguished German oculist read a paper at the
Royal Institution which was afterwards published in which he endeavoured
to prove that what he considered eccentricities of colour in Turner’s
later oil pictures were due--not to his attempts to paint the
unpaintable--but to a senile affection of his eyes, which caused an
unnatural distortion of his vision to yellow in everything. But
Professor Liebreich can hardly have been aware that although the oil
pictures upon which he rested his theory, being mainly attempts to
depict objects or scenery seen in full sunlight, necessarily tended
towards yellow as their prevailing colour, yet at the very same time,
and up to his death, Turner was daily producing the sanest, most
delicate, most refined water-colour drawings in the palest as well as
the deepest tones of every colour on his palette! All the Swiss,
Venetian and other sketches of 1838 to 1845, which are the crowning
glory of the Water-Colour Rooms in Trafalgar Square, were executed
during the period when, according to Professor Liebreich, Turner’s sight
was permanently and hopelessly affected! No doubt he recognised that
water-colour was unsuited as a medium for his new aim at painting pure
light, and confined himself accordingly, for such subjects, to oil
painting.
The attacks of the critics, however, had had their effect on the public,
and Turner in his later years began to find difficulty in selling even
his drawings. Ruskin, in his “Notes on his Drawings Exhibited at the
Fine Arts Society, 1878,” tells with inimitable charm and pathos how the
old painter, returning in the winter of 1842 from a tour in Switzerland,
brought back with him a series of important sketches, fourteen of which
he placed, as was his custom, in the hands of Griffiths, his agent, with
a view to the latter’s obtaining commissions for _finished_ drawings of
each. Although the price asked for a large finished drawing was only
eighty guineas, and notwithstanding the great beauty of the sketches,
nine commissions only could be obtained. Ruskin, his father, Munro of
Novar, and Bicknell of Herne Hill, all chose one or more, but other
former patrons saw in them what they regarded as a new style, and
declined them. Thirty years after, Ruskin--with pride for Turner’s sake,
he tells us--sold his _Lucerne Town_ for a thousand guineas; it has
since changed hands at two thousand. The _Lake of Constance_, which at
the time no one would buy, was given to Griffiths in lieu of his
commission; it fetched two thousand three hundred guineas at Christie’s
in 1907! After 1845 Turner’s health gradually failed; he continued to
work at his oil paintings up to his death in 1851, but, so far as is
known, he executed comparatively few water-colour sketches or drawings
during his last years.
Little has hitherto been said as to Turner’s _technique_ in water-colour
although the subject is one of great interest, but, unfortunately, my
point of view is solely that of a student, and _technique_ can only be
adequately dealt with by an artist. Much valuable information, however,
on the question will be found in Redgrave’s “Century of Painters,” Vol.
I., and in Roget’s “History of the Old Water-Colour Society.” From the
first he was a great innovator, choosing his materials and often
inventing his methods without regard to custom, precedent, or anything
but the attainment of the precise effect which he desired at the time.
Signs of scraping, spongeing, the use of blotting-paper, etc., are
constantly to be seen in his drawings. In some, including one in my own
possession, the marks of his thumb are distinctly visible in places. But
the result always justified the means employed! With his oil pictures,
especially those painted after 1830, his experiments, as we know, were
often disastrous in their ultimate effects, but it is extremely rare to
find any of his water-colours which have suffered in the smallest degree
when they have been properly kept. But alas, as has already been pointed
out, only too many, and amongst those some of the finest, have been, and
still are being, irretrievably damaged and changed by continual exposure
to light, both in Public Galleries and on the walls of their owners.
* * * * *
In the foregoing pages I have endeavoured to avoid adding to the already
sufficient volume of ‘æsthetic criticism’ of Turner’s art, and I shall
confine myself now to the briefest summary of what seem to me the
distinctive features of his work in water-colour.
What first strikes one in his drawings, apart from their technical
skill, is their _individuality_; they always stand out amongst the work
of other artists, however great. The chief cause of this is hard to
define, but I should say that it is that they almost invariably possess
a certain quality of imaginativeness, of what is termed ‘poetry.’ No
matter how simple was his subject, he instinctively saw it from its most
beautiful, its most romantic side. If it had little or no beauty or
romance of its own, he would still throw an indefinable charm round it
by some gleam of light, some veiling mist, some far-away distance, some
alluring sense of mystery, of ‘infinity.’ And Turner was a true poet,
although he had little enough of the look or the manners of one.
Throughout his life he was a reader and a voluminous writer of poetry,
but his want of education debarred him from ever expressing himself
coherently in verse. The same cause, together with his lack of a sense
of humour, interfered also with the perfect expression of his art,
especially in his classical and religious pictures, and prevented him
from seeing what was incongruous or at times unpleasing in them. But
only a poet deep-down could have won as he did from Nature her most
intimate secrets; could so have caught and so inimitably have portrayed
her every mood and charm.
And it is this impress of his deep love for the beauty and the grandeur
of Nature--a love as strong as Wordsworth’s, as intense as
Shelley’s--which is perhaps the greatest cause of the enduring
attractiveness of Turner’s work. Without it, he would never have toiled
as he did all his life, from dawn to dark, year in and year out,
observing and recording in those nineteen thousand studies every kind of
natural scenery, every changing contour of mist and cloud, every
differing form and structure of tree, every movement or reflection in
water, every transient effect of light, storm, wind or weather.
Then he often had a deep meaning in his pictures, beyond what was to be
seen on the surface, beyond, perhaps, what he himself could have always
explained. Sometimes, no doubt, it was far-fetched, sometimes fantastic,
yet it gives a character to his art which mere technical skill or
perfect design do not by themselves attain. By the modern school of
landscapists this would probably be regarded as a defect or even a
heresy. Pictorial art, they say, should not be ‘literary,’ should not be
intellectual. But to me it seems that the work of the highest
artists--of Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Holbein, Rembrandt, for
example--almost invariably appeals to the intellect as well as to the
senses. Mind, sensibly or insensibly, intentionally or unintentionally,
speaks to mind. As has been well said _apropos_ of Ruskin’s writings on
Turner: “What if Ruskin’s torch lights up some beauty that the painter
himself was never aware of? As a great man’s inventions will carry more
readings than his own, so the meaning of a great painter is not to be
limited to his expressed or palpable intentions. There is a harmony
between the imaginings of both and Nature, which opens out an infinite
range of significance and supports an infinite variety of
interpretations.”
After Turner had attained manhood--say from 1807 onwards--his _creative_
power constantly and increasingly made itself felt. It is more evident
in his oil pictures than in his water-colours, because in the latter,
more or less throughout his life, he was employed on illustrative,
topographical, work. But at an early period it is visible in his
drawings, notably in his _Liber Studiorum_ (1807-1819). Leaving aside
actual landscapes such as _Solway Moss_, _Ben Arthur_, etc., his
creative, imaginative power is seen in such subjects as _Æsacus and
Hesperie_, _Peat Bog_, _Procris and Cephalus_, _The Lost Sailor_ and
other plates of the _Liber_. It also appears from time to time in later
drawings. Yet a recent biographer has advanced the astonishing theory
that, whatever were Turner’s merits, up to almost the end of his life
he was not a “creative” artist, merely an _illustrator_, and this idea
has been characteristically caught up and repeated by the latest German
writer on Modern Art. But is there any truth in it? I think not. The
painter of _The Frosty Morning_, and _Crossing the Brook_ (National
Gallery); of _The Guardship at the Nore_ (Lady Wantage); of _Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage_ and _Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus_ (National
Gallery); of _The Shipwreck_ (National Gallery), and a dozen other great
Sea Pictures, not a “creative” artist? The draughtsman of _Chryses_
(Mrs. T. Ashton), _The Land’s End_ (“Southern Coast”), _The Longships
Lighthouse_ (“England and Wales”), _The Alps at Daybreak_ and _The
Vision of Columbus_ (“Rogers’s Poems”), _The Plains of Troy_ (“Byron’s
Poems”), _The Mustering of the Warrior Angels_ (“Milton’s Poems”)? If
these, and scores of others which might be added, are not examples of
“creative” art, where are “creative” landscapes to be found? Is Martin’s
_Plains of Heaven_ to be regarded as the type? Or is there no such thing
as “creative” landscape art? But, after all, does the question need
arguing? May one not just as well ask whether Botticelli, Michael
Angelo, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, were “creative” artists?
Of Turner’s technical skill in water-colour, there is no need to speak;
his command of his material was absolute and has never been equalled.
And his sense of design, of balance, of rhythm--of what is termed
“style”--was always present. He had caught it at the outset of his
career from his close study of Richard Wilson, who had inherited it as a
tradition from Caspar Poussin, Claude, and the painters of the
seventeenth century. Rarely is there anything tentative about his
drawings. They are decisive--the design was almost invariably seen by
him as a whole, from the beginning. Often his work did not please him,
and if it was finished it was discarded; if unfinished, it was carried
no further--as may be seen in several of the drawings recently (1908)
exhibited at the National Gallery, and a good many of the oil pictures
at the Tate Gallery. He was also emphatically a great colourist--one of
the greatest; during the latter half of his life he thought in colour,
and composed in colour, and it was with him an integral part of every
design. That is why his drawings can never be adequately reproduced by
ordinary photography. During middle life, as has been pointed out, his
colour at times became forced and florid, but it was never more pure,
never more beautiful, never more noble, than in his latest sketches.
At times, no doubt, Turner’s water-colours, especially those executed
between 1820 and 1836, have a tendency to undue complexity of design,
and to overcrowding both of subject and lights. Possibly to some extent
this was due to the prevailing standard of English art and English
taste at that time. Then, perhaps even more than now, high finish was
too often unduly insisted on. But you will never find too high finish or
overcrowding in the drawings which he made _for himself_! His figures,
also, were frequently unsatisfactory. It was not that he could not draw
them--at first they were dainty and careful, as may be seen in the two
early drawings, Plates I. and III. But in his later years he seemed to
regard figures simply as points of light, colour or composition--they
were always effective as such--and he often treated them
carelessly--sometimes even coarsely--to the detriment of some of his
otherwise most beautiful works.
* * * * *
Turner is often claimed by the militant school of landscapists of to-day
as one of the first and greatest ‘impressionists.’ In a certain sense no
doubt this is true, but his ‘impressionism,’ it seems to me, was wholly
different in nature from theirs.
During his life, as we have seen, he made thousands of sketches, some
slight, some elaborate, of places, scenery, and natural
effects--shorthand memoranda,’ so to speak--many of which may certainly
be called ‘impressionist.’ _But all these were founded on, or were
intended to add to, his accurate, minute and exhaustive study of natural
forms, and a draughtsmanship which has probably never been equalled by
any other landscape painter._
Then, as is notorious, he frequently altered certain features of
landscapes or buildings to suit the requirements of his pictures--their
symmetry, their accent, their colour-scheme--or in order to convey some
suggestion as to their meaning. In a letter still preserved, he declares
himself opposed to literalism in landscape--“mere map-making” he terms
it. And when for any reason he thus altered the actual features of a
scene, he still almost always contrived to preserve the _impression_ of
it as a whole--usually under its best aspect, at its choicest moment. In
this sense also he was an ‘impressionist.’
Again, when towards the close of his life he began to attempt the
representation (mainly in oil colour) of pure sunlight--as in his latest
_Venice_ pictures; or of form in swiftest movement--as in _Rain, Speed
and Steam_; or of the mighty contending forces of Nature--as in his
_Snow Storm off Harwich_, he painted _such subjects_ in the only method
by which they could be intelligibly rendered. In the same way Whistler,
in his Nocturnes, demonstrated for the first time in Western art, the
beauty of prosaic and even ugly objects, seen in dim light. Both
perforce adopted the ‘impressionist’ method, because it was the only
effective, indeed the only possible one.
But to me it appears that there is all the difference in the world
between _these_ phases of ‘impressionist’ art and the principles of the
modern landscape school, whose works a brilliant set of writers in the
press of to-day are continually calling upon us to admire. The advanced
‘impressionists’ both in France and in England seem to go out of their
way to represent _the ordinary aspects of nature_ with a manifest
determination to avoid any but the vaguest rendering of form, no matter
how clearly defined in such circumstances those forms may seem to
ordinary Philistine vision. They also ordinarily abjure as ‘literary’
any kind of appeal to the intellectual faculties, and apparently confine
their aim to the production of a more or less startling, but generally
cleverly managed patterning of light, shade, and colour, obtained
usually by means of masses of coarse, solid, and often ragged pigment,
carefully arranged so that the effect intended may be found, like a
fire-plug, at a certain exact, calculated spot. Surely Turner’s
‘impressionism’ was far removed from this? Surely it is hard that he
should be charged with being the precursor of the landscape school to
which I have alluded, whatever may be its merits?
* * * * *
Possibly it is too soon as yet to predict what will be Turner’s ultimate
place in art. Like every really great artist (I use the word in its
widest sense) he will be judged, not by his defects or his
mistakes--even if they be many and palpable--but by the _heights_ to
which he attained, and the mark which he has left for others to follow.
For myself, I believe that if his water-colours are allowed to remain
unfaded for future generations, they, along with his best oil pictures,
will be counted worthy to entitle him to a place amongst the greatest
painters of all centuries and all schools.
W. G. RAWLINSON.
[In common with the Editor of _The Studio_, I desire to acknowledge
my deep obligations to the various owners of valuable drawings by
Turner, who have kindly allowed them to be reproduced here. There
were, however, others which I should like to have seen represented,
but as these were not available, the Editor desired to replace them
with examples from my own collection. This must explain what will
otherwise seem the undue proportion of the latter.--W. G. R.]
THE TURNER DRAWINGS IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. BY A. J. FINBERG.
The usual way of painting a landscape nowadays is for the artist to take
his easel and canvas out into the fields, and to work as far as possible
with the scene he is representing before his eyes. The scene, with the
artist’s chosen effect, is of course constantly changing, so the artist
can work only for a short time each day. The effect itself will probably
last for a period varying from a couple of minutes to about half an
hour, according to circumstances; but the painter may be usefully
employed in getting his work into condition for about an hour before the
effect is due, and he may work on for perhaps another hour while the
effect is still fresh in his memory. As one sitting of this kind will
not enable the artist to carry his work far, it is necessary that he
should return day after day to the scene; and if he is determined to
paint it entirely on the spot, he must be prepared to devote some months
at least to the work.
The habit of painting and finishing pictures entirely out of doors was,
I believe, introduced by the Pre-Raphaelites during the fifties, but
before this, Constable and other artists had worked largely from rather
elaborate colour studies made out of doors. Turner did not work at all
in this way. All his pictures were painted in the studio, and generally
from very slight pencil sketches. So far as I know he never made even a
slight colour study from nature for any of his pictures.
As the methods of work employed by the great artists are of very great
interest, I think it will be worth while to take one of his wellknown
works and to trace its evolution somewhat in detail. The beautiful
drawing of _Norham Castle_, reproduced here (Plate XIV.), will do very
well for this purpose.
This drawing was made to be engraved in a series known as the “Rivers of
England.” Charles Turner’s really fine mezzotint of it was published in
1824, so the drawing must have been made at least a year or two before
this date. The pencil sketch on which it was based was made some quarter
of a century earlier--to be quite accurate, in the summer or autumn of
1797.
At that time Turner was a young man of twenty-two, but he had already
made his mark as one of the best topographical and antiquarian
draughtsmen of the day. He had been a regular exhibitor at the Royal
Academy for eight years, and publishers and amateurs were beginning to
compete for his productions. It was his habit every summer to map out
for himself a lengthy sketching tour, his aim being to accumulate in his
portfolio a pencil drawing made by himself of every building or natural
feature that he might be called upon to illustrate. These subjects were
dictated by the taste of the time, which generally ran towards the
ruined abbeys and castles of the middle ages. As Turner’s subject-matter
was prescribed for him in this way, he did not, like the modern artist,
have to waste any time looking for promising subjects. He had merely to
study the numerous guide-books that were even then in existence, to make
out a list of the more important castles, abbeys, and Gothic buildings,
and to hurry from one to the other as fast as the coaches or his own
sturdy legs could carry him. The methodical and stolidly business-like
manner in which he set about and carried through this part of his work
is calculated to shock the gushing and casual temperament of the artist
of to-day.
Turner’s programme in 1797 was an extensive one, and, what is much more
remarkable, he carried it out. He seems to have taken the coach into
Derbyshire, as he had already appropriated everything of interest in the
Midland counties. He carried two sketch books with him, each bound
handsomely in calf, the smaller with four heavy brass clasps, the larger
with seven. The pages in the smaller book measure about 10½ by 8¼
inches, those of the larger about 14½ by 10½. Both these books are now
in the National Gallery collection, and will shortly, I hope, be made
accessible to students and the general public.
The campaign opens with two drawings of, I think, _Wingfield Manor_,
then comes a church with a tall spire on a hill which I cannot identify;
then we have one drawing of _Rotherham Bridge_ with the chapel on it,
then one of _Conisborough Castle_, single views of the exterior and
interior of _Doncaster Church_, three different views of the ruins of
_Pontefract Church_, and then two neat drawings of the _Chantry on the
Bridge at Wakefield_. It is not till he gets to Kirkstall Abbey that the
artist seems to pause in his breathless rush to the North. There are no
less than nine drawings of this subject, all made from different points
of view; one of these leaves containing the sketch of the Crypt--from
which Sir John Soane’s impressive water-colour was made--contains just a
fragment of colour, and has been for many years among the drawings
exhibited on the ground floor of the National Gallery. In this way we
can follow Turner to Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountains and Easby Abbeys,
Richmond, Barnard Castle, Egglestone Abbey and Durham, and then along
the coast to Warkworth, Alnwick, Dunstanborough, Bamborough and Holy
Island. Judging from the drawings, I think it probable that Turner spent
the best part of a day at Holy Island, but he got to Berwick in time to
draw a general view of the town and bridge, and to make a slight sketch
with his limited gamut of colours--black, blue, and yellow only--of the
evening effect. The next morning he was up in time to see the sun rise
from behind the towers of Norham Castle, and to trace a slight and
hurried pencil outline of the main features of the scene. There is only
this one sketch of the subject, and it does not contain the slightest
suggestion of light and shade or of effect. But there were Kelso and
Melrose and Dryburgh and Jedburgh Abbeys close by waiting to be drawn,
and Turner evidently felt he must hurry on. Having drawn these ruins in
his neat and precise way he turned south and struck into Cumberland. In
the larger sketch book a drawing inscribed _Keswick_ follows immediately
after one of the views of _Melrose Abbey_. Then comes _Cockermouth
Castle_, _the Borrowdale_, _Buttermere_, _St. John’s Vale_, _Grasmere_,
_Rydal_, _Langdale_, and _Ulleswater with Helvellyn in the distance_.
Then follow in rapid succession _Ambleside Mill_, _Windermere_,
_Coniston_, _Furness Abbey_, _Lancaster_, and after a single drawing of
_Bolton Abbey_ we find ourselves in York, where the Cathedral and the
ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey and Bootham Bar must have detained the artist
for perhaps two or three days. The tour, however, is not yet at an end,
for the Hon. Mr. Lascelles (who became Earl of Harewood in 1820) wants
some drawings of Harewood House and of the ruins of Harewood Castle, and
Mr. Hewlett wants some subjects to engrave in his forthcoming “Views in
the County of Lincoln.” It is, therefore, through Howden, Louth, Boston,
Sleaford, and Peterborough that Turner makes his way back to London. He
must have been back by September, for among the drawings exhibited at
the Royal Academy in the following May was one described as “_A Study in
September of the Fern House, Mr. Lock’s Park, Mickleham, Surrey_.” He
can, therefore, hardly have been away much more than three months, if so
long, but his strenuous vacation had yielded an abundant crop of useful
material.
It must have been October before Turner was fairly back in his studio in
Hand Court, Maiden Lane, and had settled down to work up this material.
By the following April he had four important oil paintings and six
water-colours ready for the Exhibition. One of these oil paintings (the
_Dunstanborough Castle_) now hangs in the Melbourne National Gallery, to
which it was presented by the late Duke of Westminster; two others
(_Winesdale, Yorkshire--an Autumnal Morning_ and _Morning amongst the
Coniston Fells_) hang in the little Octagon room in Trafalgar Square,
and the fourth is on loan to the Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. This is
the _Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromack Water_, a really fine
painting, though it has darkened considerably. As the first important
oil painting in which Turner’s genius was clearly manifested, I should
rejoice to see it hanging in Trafalgar Square. The pencil drawing on
which it was based contains some work in water-colour, possibly made
direct from nature, but the details and general effect have been
entirely recast in the finished work. Among the water-colours were the
gloomy and superb _Kirkstall Abbey_, now in the Soane Museum, to which I
have already referred, and the drawing of _Norham Castle_, with which we
are now more particularly concerned.
The drawing exhibited in 1798 is not the one here reproduced. The
exhibited drawing is probably the one now in the possession of Mr.
Laundy Walters. A photographic reproduction of it was published in Sir
Walter Armstrong’s “Turner” (p. 34), and it is worth pausing a moment to
compare this with the original pencil sketch and to consider in exactly
what relation these two drawings stand to each other.
The usual way of describing the process by which a slight sketch from
nature is converted into a finished drawing is to say that the artist
copied his sketch as far as it went and then relied upon his memory for
the further elaboration that was required. An artist’s memory is assumed
to consist of images of the scenes he has witnessed, which he has some
mysterious power of storing somewhere in his mind, something like, I
suppose, the undeveloped exposures in a Kodak. According to this theory
we should have to assume that the particular sight of the sun rising
behind Norham Towers which had greeted Turner on the morning he hurried
from Berwick to Kelso had been treasured up in the inner recesses of his
consciousness, and then some months afterwards, when the appropriate
moment came, he had only to select this particular image from among the
millions of other images in the same mysterious storehouse, to develop
it and copy it on to his canvas. I need hardly add that this desperate
theory is quite fanciful and absurd, and in flat contradiction to the
teachings of modern psychology.
A description that would not be open to such objections would run
something like this: When we are dealing with the processes of artistic
creation we have to assume an intelligent human agent, and analogies
drawn from purely mechanical sources can only mislead us. We must not
assume that an artist’s senses and intellect work like the mechanism of
a camera, or in any other abnormal way, unless we have some strong
evidence to support us. And we must also remember that a visual image is
a useful abstraction in psychology, but in the conscious life of an
intelligent human being it is merely an element within the ordinary life
of thought and feeling. Let us therefore assume that Turner not only
made no effort to retain the exact visual impression of the scene in
question, but that he did not even attempt to separate this impression
from the general whole of thought and feeling in which it was
experienced. The particular matter of sense-perception would then
become incorporated in the general idea or the object--in the ordinary
way in which sense qualities are preserved in ideas. When Turner
therefore sat down to make his picture, what he would have prominently
and clearly before his mind would be a general idea of Norham Castle as
a ruined border fortress, a scene of many a bloody fray and of much
bygone splendour and suffering. In short, his idea would be what the
art-criticism of the Henley type used to describe contemptuously as
“literary”; that is, it was steeped in the colours of the historical
imagination, and was practically the same as that which a man like Sir
Walter Scott or any cultivated person of the present time would
associate with the same object. Instead, therefore, of having a single
image before his mind which he had merely to copy, Turner started with a
complex idea, which might, indeed, have been expressed more or less
adequately in the terms of some other art, but which he chose on this
occasion to express in pictorial terms.
In this way we can understand why Turner did, as a matter of fact,
frequently and constantly attempt to express his ideas in the form of
verbal poetry, and why, in the drawing we are now considering, he felt
himself justified not only in filling out his sketch with details that
were neither there nor in the real scene, but also in taking
considerable liberties with the facts contained in the sketch, altering
them and falsifying them in ways that could not be defended if his aim
had been to reproduce the actual scene itself. The colouring too of Mr.
Walter’s drawing owes much more to Turner’s study of Wilson’s pictures
than to his visual memory of natural scenes; that is to say, the colour
is used as an instrument of expression,--as a means to bring the
imagination and feelings of the spectator into harmony with the artist’s
ideas, as well as to indicate in the clearest possible manner that it
was not the artist’s intention to represent the actual scene in its
prosaic details.
This picture, with the others exhibited in 1798, settled the question
for Turner’s brother artists and for himself that he was a genuinely
imaginative artist and not a merely clever topographical draughtsman.
The following year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, at
the early age of twenty-four, and throughout his long life he always
regarded himself as entitled to take any liberties with actual
topographical facts that the expression of his ideas demanded.
The success of the first _Norham Castle_ drawing induced Turner to
repeat the subject several times. The late Mrs. Thwaites had another
water-colour of it in her collection, there are at least three
unfinished versions in the National Gallery, and I have seen a version
of it in oil. The subject was engraved in the “Liber” from what
purported to be the picture in the possession of the Hon. Mr. Lascelles,
but really from a fresh design made by the artist. Then Turner painted
the subject again for Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, and again, about 1822 or
1823, he made the drawing for the “Rivers of England” series, here
reproduced. What is so interesting in all this is that the details in
each of these versions are different, yet they all seem to have been
based on the same pencil sketch. The relative size of the castle varies
in each drawing, as well as the details of its embrasures and crumbling
masonry; the character of the river banks also varies. In the earlier
versions the right bank is steep and rocky, as suiting the solemn and
gloomy effect of the subject; in the latest version, where the humble
pastoral life of the present is thrown more into prominence, this bank
becomes flat and peopled with fishermen, their boats and cows.
In one of the many anecdotes told of Turner he is represented as saying
to an artist who had complained of the disappointment he had experienced
on revisiting a certain place, “Don’t you know you must paint your
impressions”--or words to that effect. I don’t know how true the story
is--and I may confess that I have almost got into the habit of
disbelieving _all_ the stories told about Turner--but whether true or
not this particular anecdote is certainly well invented. Turner knew
quite well how large a part his subjective feelings and ideas played in
all his work, and it made him shy of revisiting places that had once
impressed him. But when he spoke of his “impressions” we must be careful
not to suppose that he could have used the expression in the way it is
often used now. He did not abstract his particular visual impressions
from the emotional and ideational context in which they were
experienced. In so far as Impressionism means this kind of abstraction,
Turner was never an impressionist. And as his first ideas of places were
steeped in the colouring of his own subjective life, so his ideas were
ever taking on different hues as his temper and character changed. In
this way he could use the same sketch again and again and always get
different effects from it; the sensuous datum was merely a point of
departure for each fresh improvisation, a form into which he could pour
his meditations, but a flexible, plastic form which readily took the
shape of its spiritual content.
These considerations may help us to understand what is apt at first to
strike the student of Turner’s drawings and sketches as strange and
incomprehensible. Turner was always sketching from nature, and often
making drawings that contain an amazing wealth of detail and definition,
yet the usefulness of his sketches seemed to vary in inverse ratio to
their definition and to the time spent upon them. The beautiful drawings
never seemed to lead to anything, all the pictures being painted by
preference from the slightest and vaguest sketches. Thus the sketch book
which contains the sketch of _Norham Castle_ is filled with over ninety
drawings, most of them full of detail and delightfully precise and
graceful in handling. Turner made good use of most of this material, but
the most prolific “breeding” subject--to use one of Richard Wilson’s
expressions--was unquestionably the hurried scribble of Norham, which
was so slight as not to indicate even the general shape of the ruined
tower with precision, and which left the number of windows or embrasures
entirely undetermined. But when we see how Turner used his sketches we
can easily understand that this absence of definition must often have
been a positive advantage to him when he came to paint his pictures.
There was less “to put him out,” fewer obstacles in the way of his
subjective utterance, the form was more fluid and tractable to his
immediate purpose. The more detailed studies were of course not wasted,
for the knowledge they gave him enabled him to fill out the slightest
hints of his “breeding” subjects with an inexhaustible wealth of
plausible detail.
The National Gallery collection contains just on three hundred of
Turner’s sketch books, and practically the whole of his work done
immediately in the presence of nature. This data enables us to speak
with absolute authority upon the difficult question as to the relation
between Turner’s art and nature. They prove that he very seldom, if
ever, painted a picture simply “out of his head.” In everything he
did--even, I believe, in the case of what have been called his classical
nonsense pictures--there was a nucleus of immediately perceived fact.
This sensuous basis is seldom, if ever, absent from his work, but it is
invariably overlaid and distorted by the purely subjective forces of the
artist’s personality, which appropriate the data of sense, and mould
them into any shape they choose. It is impossible, especially since
“Modern Painters” was written, to overlook the important part played by
natural fact in all of Turner’s creations, but it is just as important
not to overlook the equally obvious and certain truth that Turner never
uses nature simply for its own sake, but only as a means of expression.
The methods employed in the particular case we have just studied are,
with few exceptions, the methods which he adopted during the whole of
his career.
Yet Turner did undoubtedly upon occasion paint in oil directly from
nature. An instance of this kind is described by Sir Charles Eastlake in
“Thornbury” (p. 153, 3rd edition). Eastlake met Turner during his second
visit to Devonshire, probably in the summer of 1813, and accompanied him
to a cottage near Calstock, the residence of Eastlake’s aunt, where they
stayed for a few days. Another artist was with them, a Mr. Ambrose
Johns, of Plymouth. It was during their rambles in the neighbourhood of
Calstock that Turner gathered the material for his picture of “_Crossing
the Brook_.” Eastlake says that “Turner made his sketches in pencil and
by stealth,” that is to say, he did not like to have people looking over
his shoulder while he was at work. The sketch book Turner used on this
occasion is with the others in the National Gallery. But after the three
artists had returned to Plymouth, “in the neighbourhood of which he
(Turner) remained some weeks, Mr. Johns fitted up a small portable
painting-box, containing some prepared paper for oil sketches, as well
as the other necessary materials. When Turner halted at a scene and
seemed inclined to sketch it, Johns produced the inviting box, and the
great artist, finding everything ready to his hand, immediately began to
work. As he sometimes wanted assistance in the use of the box, the
presence of Johns was indispensable, and after a few days he made his
oil sketches freely in our presence. Johns accompanied him always; I was
only with them occasionally. Turner seemed pleased when the rapidity
with which those sketches were done was talked of; for, departing from
his habitual reserve in the instance of his pencil sketches, he made no
difficulty of showing them. On one occasion, when, on his return after a
sketching ramble to a country residence belonging to my father, near
Plympton, the day’s work was shown, he himself remarked that one of the
sketches (and perhaps the best) was done in less than half an hour.” “On
my enquiring afterwards,” Sir Charles Eastlake adds, “what had become of
those sketches, Turner replied that they were worthless, in consequence,
as he supposed, of some defect in the preparation of the paper; all the
grey tints, he observed, had nearly disappeared. Although I did not
implicitly rely on that statement, I do not remember to have seen any of
them afterwards.”
There are about a dozen small oil sketches of Devonshire subjects in the
National Gallery, which are doubtless part of those made under the
circumstances described by Sir Charles Eastlake. They are made on a
brownish millboard, prepared with a thin coating of paint and size. On
the back of one of them there happens to be some lettering showing that
Johns had laid violent hands on the covers of some parts of William
Young Ottley’s “British Gallery of Pictures,” then being issued
serially. Several of these paintings have long been hung among the
exhibited drawings; _e.g._, Nos. 746, 750, 754, 758, and one, No. 849,
which has somehow got the obviously incorrect title of _Bridge over
River Lugwy, Capel Curig_. These paintings have undoubtedly sunk very
much into the absorbent millboard, thus proving that Turner’s remark to
Eastlake about the disappearance of the grey tints--which he “did not
implicitly rely on”--was justified. But otherwise the work is in good
condition, and I have very little doubt that when Mr. Buttery comes to
take them in hand, he will be able to bring them back to something like
their original freshness. The chief point of interest with regard to
them, from our present point of view, is the curious fact that Turner
does not seem to have made the slightest use of them in any of the
Devonshire pictures he painted on his return. He evidently found his
tiny little pencil sketches much more suggestive and adaptable to his
purposes. Even the large oil picture of _Crossing the Brook_ is based
entirely on his slight and rapidly made little pencil notes. Another
point of interest is that even when painting in oil face to face with
nature he did not merely copy what he had in front of him. As our
illustration shows, these sketches are as carefully composed as his
pictures. They are indeed only technically sketches from nature; in
reality they are designs for pictures or pictures in miniature, though
they happen to have been painted out of doors. Even in working direct
from nature Turner remained firmly entrenched in his artistic position
as the master of nature. He still retained his power of selection,
taking what suited his purpose, ignoring the rest, and supplementing
from the stores of his own knowledge what for his purpose were the
defects of the momentary image before his eyes.
The fact that Turner always worked in this way makes it exceedingly
difficult to separate his sketches from nature from the studies or
designs for his pictures. Throughout his sketch books and amongst his
loose drawings there are a large number of sketches in colour, and one’s
first impulse is to assume that these were made immediately from nature.
But careful observation shows that Turner was in the constant habit of
working over his pencil sketches in colour when away from the scenes he
had depicted. In this way the beautiful little sketch of “_Edinburgh
from St. Margaret’s Loch_,” here reproduced (Plate VI.), is much more
probably the draft of a picture the artist had in his mind’s eye than a
study from nature. But the point whether such a drawing was made “on the
spot” or not is relatively unimportant; what is more important is to
realise how very small a part the merely imitative or representative
study of the colour and tone (as opposed to form) of nature played in
Turner’s work. His colour is never merely descriptive. The whole bent of
his mind is so essentially pictorial that, whether he works face to face
with nature or from what is loosely called “memory,” his slightest
sketch as well as his most elaborate work is always an attempt to
express a subjective conception, and never a merely literal transcript
of what is given in sense-perception.
Perhaps the most important group of drawings in the national collection
are those which Turner made during the last ten years of his working
life, _i.e._, between 1835 and 1845. These drawings were not made for
sale or for exhibition, hence Mr. Ruskin’s description of them as
“delight drawings,” because they were done entirely for the artist’s own
pleasure and delight. Several of them are reproduced in this volume,
among them the beautiful sketch of “_Lucerne_” (Plate XXI.) realized for
Mr. Ruskin in 1842, the almost equally fine “_Bellinzona, from the road
to Locarno_” (Plate XXIV.), and “_Zurich_” (Plate XXVII.).
These inimitable and delightful sketches have been very widely admired,
as they deserve to be, but they have also been praised, somewhat
perversely as it seems to me, for their truth and accuracy of
representation. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, these sketches “are not,
strictly speaking, sketches from nature; but plans or designs of
pictures which Turner, if he had had time, would have made of each
place. They indicate, therefore, a perfectly formed conception of the
finished picture; and they are of exactly the same value as memoranda
would be, if made by Turner’s own hand, of pictures of his not in our
possession. They are just to be regarded as quick descriptions or
reminiscences of noble pictures.” Mr. Ruskin is also unquestionably
correct when he adds “that nothing but the pencilling in them was done
on the spot, and not always that. Turner used to walk about a town with
a roll of thin paper in his pocket, and make a few scratches upon a
sheet or two of it, which were so much shorthand indication of all he
wished to remember. When he got to his inn in the evening, he completed
the pencilling rapidly, and added as much colour as was needed to record
his plan of the picture” (“Ruskin on Pictures,” pp. 86-7).
It is not my intention now to dwell upon the beauty of these
incomparable drawings, on their passionate intensity and emotional
sincerity, their nervous eloquence and elusive suggestiveness. The point
I wish to insist on at present is that they must not be regarded as
attempts to reproduce or imitate the merely superficial qualities of
physical nature, as attempts to give an accurate representation of
effects of air or light, or of the shapes and forms of mountain, water
or cloud. The artist is not immersed in the definite character of
physical objects. He seems to feel that as a spiritual and
self-conscious being he is something higher than the merely natural, and
it is as modes of expression of human freedom and self-consciousness
that these lyrical fragments must be regarded.
The colour and tone of Turner’s work must therefore be taken as strictly
ideal, that is, as a medium of subjective expression, as a mode of
spiritual manifestation, and not as an attempt to represent the merely
abstract qualities of sense-perception. And what is true of Turner’s
colour and tone is also true of his form. I doubt if he ever made a
tolerably careful and elaborate drawing of a natural scene from the
beginning to the end of his long career--nearly all his elaborate
drawings being of architectural subjects. But instead of the prosaic and
plodding drawings that other artists make (see, for example, the
elaborate pencil studies of trees by Constable in the Victoria and
Albert Museum), we find hundreds and hundreds of nervous, eager pencil
sketches. When we come to study these ravishing sketches with care we
make the astonishing discovery that the bugbear of the drawing school,
the prosaic accumulation of particular physical facts known in art
academies as “nature,” is simply a hideous abstraction of the
theoretical mind. Nature, in this sense of the word, never existed for
Turner. The world he saw around him was replete with intelligence, was
permeated with spirit; where other artists see only the bare, unrelated
physical fact and sensuous surface, his mind is already busy with the
inner and invisible significance, and his cunning hand is instantly
shaping forth a pictorial embodiment of his own insight and passionate
convictions.
On the whole, then, this was Turner’s consistent attitude towards
nature, though of course, in his earlier years, his sketches were
comparatively less swift and eloquent than they afterwards became. And
there was indeed a short period during which the merely physical fact
was forced into undue prominence. This period culminated in the first
visit to Italy in 1819-1820. Here the novelty of the scenery and
buildings stimulated the thirst for detailed observation which had been
gradually growing on Turner during the previous six or seven years. But
in England the very quickness and strength of his intuitions had always
prevented the desire for precise observation from gaining the upper
hand. In Italy his powers of intuition were useless. He was disoriented.
Everything disconcerted and thwarted him. His rapid glance no longer
penetrated to the inner essence of the scenes around him. He did not
understand the people and their ways, and their relation to their
surroundings. For a time he seemed to become less certain than usual of
his artistic mission. But he set to work with his usual pluck and energy
to assimilate his strange surroundings by tireless observation of the
outside. The result was a vast accumulation of disorganized or of only
partially organized impressions.
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 conceptual unity.
Yet if we confine our attention to the merely formal and abstract side
of art, there is assuredly much to move us even to enthusiastic
admiration among the immense quantity of sketches accumulated during
this Italian visit. The very fact that Turner’s inspiration was checked
prevented his sketches from possessing their wonted rudimentary or
forward-pointing character. Instead of being hasty drafts of the
pictures that thronged instantly into his mind upon contact with the
scenes of his native land, they became more like the drawings which less
completely equipped creative artists are in the habit of making; they
became “studies” in the modern use of the term. The conditions of their
production gave full play to Turner’s marvellous powers of
draughtsmanship and formal design. Before drawings like _Rome from Monte
Mario_ who can help waxing enthusiastic over the exquisitely deft and
graceful play of hand, the subtle observation and the almost superhuman
mastery of the design? No wonder Mr. Ruskin has declared that “no
drawings in the world are to be named with these ... as lessons in
landscape drawing” (“Ruskin on Pictures,” p. 157). But before assenting
wholly to this dictum we must remember that, in spite of all their
attractiveness, Turner found these drawings worse than useless for his
general artistic purposes, and that only bad and foolish pictures came
from them; and the more carefully we study the matter the more clearly
do we see that nothing but bad and foolish pictures could come from work
in which the spirit of curiosity and of cold and accurate observation is
predominant.
We have fixed our attention thus far upon the sketches and drawings made
from nature in the National Gallery collection, to the exclusion of the
finished water-colours. This may seem all the more inexcusable, as I
have preferred to treat these sketches rather with regard to their
bearing upon the artist’s finished work--as stages in the development of
the complete work of art--than as independent productions which can be
accepted entirely for their own sake. But in a short paper like the
present it is impossible to do justice to all the sides of such an
important collection as the Drawings of the Turner Bequest. Numerically,
the finished drawings form only a small fraction of the whole
collection--about two hundred out of a total of over 20,000 drawings.
Among them are about two-thirds of the “Rivers of France” drawings, and
most of the “Ports” and “Rivers of England,” and Rogers’s “Vignettes.”
These drawings were engraved during Turner’s lifetime and under his
active superintendence; they are, therefore, amongst the best known of
his works. The whole of the finished drawings have, moreover, been
constantly on exhibition for more than fifty years. There remains,
therefore, little either of praise or blame to be said of them that has
not already been said many times. While, on the other hand, the studies
and sketches are only now on the point of being made accessible to the
public.
The practically complete series of Turner’s sketches and studies from
nature seems to call for comprehensive treatment. Their careful study
throws a wholly new and unexpected light upon the fundamental and
essential qualities of Turner’s attitude towards nature, and therefore
upon the essential character and limitations of his art. Or where the
light is not altogether unexpected--as it would not be perhaps in the
case of a diligent and methodical student of Turner’s completed
works--the sketches amplify and illustrate in an abundant and forcible
way what before could only have been surmised. I propose, therefore, to
devote the remainder of my limited space to an attempt to indicate as
briefly as possible the main features of Turner’s conception of nature,
as it is revealed in his sketches, and to point out its importance both
for the proper understanding of his finished work and for its bearing
upon some adverse criticisms that have been brought against his work.
In my opening remarks I ventured to contrast Turner’s attitude towards
nature with the attitude of the majority of contemporary artists. My
intention in thus opposing these two different methods of work was not
to suggest that one of them was either right or wrong in itself, or that
one way was necessarily better or worse than the other. My intention was
exactly the opposite. There is not one type of art production to which
all artists must conform, and two totally different methods of procedure
may each be positively right and equally valid. I will even go farther
than this and confess that I regard the present-day method of working
from nature as the only right and proper way of attaining the results
that are aimed at. But it is the result, the purpose of the artist, that
justifies the means, and this applies with just as much force to
Turner’s way of working as to the modern way. To condemn Turner’s
procedure, therefore, simply because it differs from that now in vogue,
would be as unwise and unfair as to condemn the modern way because it
differed from his. Different conceptions of the aim and scope of art
involve different attitudes towards nature, and necessitate different
methods of study.
Let us begin with the current conception--the conception of the
landscape artist of to-day and of the public for which he works. The
aim of this art is what is called “naturalness,” that is, the picture
should be made to look as much like nature as possible. The standard of
excellence here is just the ordinary common appearance of physical
reality. A picture that looks like nature is good, and one that looks
“unnatural” is therefore bad. This kind of art is capable of giving a
great deal of innocent pleasure to people who like to be reminded of
scenes they love or are interested in. But it has its limits. It cannot
go beyond the bare physical world. And it is bound to treat even this
limited area of experience from a strictly limited point of view. It is
bound to take the physical world as something which exists in entire
independence of the spectator, as something which is indeed given in
sense-perception, but which the spectator emphatically finds and does
not make. Now so far as we take nature in this sense we have to do with
an external power which is utterly indifferent to our merely human aims
and purposes, and the artist can only look upon himself as a passive
recipient, a _tabula rasa_, on which external nature is reflected. This
is the standpoint of the prosaic intelligence, the level upon which much
of the ordinary reflection and discussion of the day moves.
But man is not really a passive mirror in which a foreign nature is
reflected, nor is he satisfied merely to submit himself to natural
influences and vicissitudes. Man is never really satisfied to take the
world as he finds it, but sets to work to transform it into what he
feels it ought to be. The social and political world, with its realms of
morality, art and religion, came into existence as a protest against the
merely natural. In this world, created and sustained by human
intelligence and will, the physical world is not abolished or destroyed,
but it is transformed into a more or less willing accomplice of a
strange and higher power. It is in this new form which nature assumes
under the sway of intelligence and will that we find it in Turner’s
works.[B] In his presence the external world loses its stubborn
indifference to human aims and becomes saturated with purely human
aspiration and emotion. Its colours and shapes cease to belong to the
merely physical world. They become instead the garment in which the
inward spiritual nature of the artist robes itself. Nature in this new
aspect is no longer a merely hostile and mechanical system of laws; a
soul has been breathed into it which we recognize as identical with our
own.
Now it is evident that these two kinds of art, the passive and the
active, with their totally dissimilar aims, cannot and ought not to
represent nature in the same way. The art which uses nature as a medium
for the expression of ideas and feelings cannot attain its object by
representing physical objects in the simple and direct way appropriate
to the art which aims merely at naturalness. The artist’s intention must
make itself manifest even in the manner in which he represents physical
objects,--indeed, he has no other way of expressing his ideas. The
active or creative artist will therefore make it clear that he has
broken entirely with the disconnected, accidental and prosaic look of
everyday existence which it is the one aim of the passive artist to
retain.
From this point of view the charges that are often brought against
Turner, that his colour is forced and unnatural, will leave us cold and
indifferent. To make such an objection is merely a proof of mental
confusion. The creative artist _must_ break with the prosaic vision of
nature, if only to make it evident that his objects are not there for
their own sake and for their immediate effect, but to call forth a
response and echo in the mind of the observer. Turner’s colour--“dyed in
the ardours of the atmosphere”--is one of his most potent instruments of
expression, and must be judged as we judge, let us say, the verbal magic
of Shelley’s verse, as a work of free beauty, fashioned in response to
the deepest and truest cravings of man’s nature.
That Turner’s art moves mainly among the highest interests of man’s
spiritual nature accounts to some extent for the pre-eminent position he
now occupies among modern artists. It is always as an artist conscious
of man’s high destiny that he claims to be judged, and though he often
stumbled and his hand faltered, he never once sank to the level of the
passive and prosaic imitator of nature’s finitude. This is not the place
to inquire minutely into Turner’s failings and shortcomings, nor to
study their connection with the innumerable masterpieces in which he
dared and sometimes attained the very highest of which art is capable.
An adequate discussion of the subtle inter-connection of Turner’s
triumphs and failings would involve the raising of questions of which
English criticism seems to prefer to remain in happy ignorance. I cannot
therefore attempt to justify my conviction that he is not only the
greatest artist our nation has yet produced, but also one of the
greatest of modern artists, a man we must rank with Rembrandt and Jean
François Millet. But this at least will be generally conceded, that he
fully deserves that consideration and sympathy, which the ready instinct
of mankind reserves for those who devote themselves without stint and
without measure to the highest and most difficult tasks.
A. J. FINBERG.
[Illustration: Plate I
THE ARCHBISHOP’S PALACE, LAMBETH
FIRST EXHIBITED DRAWING. R.A. 1790. SIZE 15″ × 10½″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate II
THE MOUTH OF THE AVON.
CIRCA 1792. SIZE 11¼″ × 8¾″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate III
PETERBOROUGH CATHEDRAL FROM THE NORTH
CIRCA 1794. SIZE 7″ × 4¼″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate IV
THE PENT, DOVER
CIRCA 1794. SIZE 10¼″ × 8″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate V
DISTANT VIEW OF LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL
CIRCA 1798. SIZE 30½″ × 19¾″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate VI
EDINBURGH: FROM ST. MARGARET’S LOCH
CIRCA 1801. SIZE 7¾″ × 5″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON]
[Illustration: Plate VII
STONEHENGE: SUNSET
CIRCA 1804. SIZE 8¾″ × 6¾″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate VIII
SCARBOROUGH
CIRCA 1812. SIZE 16″ × 11″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF C. MORLAND AGNEW, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate IX
LULWORTH COVE
CIRCA 1813. SIZE 8½″ × 5¾″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate X
GOARHAUSEN AND KATZ CASTLE
CIRCA 1817. SIZE 12″ × 7¾″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate XI
THE LAKE OF NEMI
CIRCA 1818. Size 8½″ × 5½″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF C. MORLAND AGNEW, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate XII
TURIN: FROM THE CHURCH OF THE SUPERGA
CIRCA 1818. SIZE 8½″ × 5½″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF C. MORLAND AGNEW, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate XIII
THE CROOK OF THE LUNE
CIRCA 1818. SIZE 16¾″ × 11¼″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF REV. WILLIAM MACGREGOR]
[Illustration: Plate XIV
NORHAM CASTLE
CIRCA 1822. SIZE 8½″ × 6½″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. No. 175]
[Illustration: Plate XV
LAUNCESTON
CIRCA 1827. SIZE 15½″ × 11″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF J. F. SCHWANN, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate XVI
BARNARD CASTLE
CIRCA 1827. Size 8⅞″ × 6½″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate XVII
ON THE LAKE AT PETWORTH--EVENING
CIRCA 1830. SIZE 7½″ × 5¼″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. No. 425d]
[Illustration: Plate XVIII
COWES
CIRCA 1830. SIZE 16½″ × 11¼″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. YATES, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate XIX
VENICE: THE SALUTE FROM S. GIORGIO MAGGIORE
CIRCA 1839. SIZE 12″ × 9½″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. No. 54]
[Illustration: Plate XX
VENICE: CASA GRIMANI AND THE RIALTO
CIRCA 1839. SIZE 11″ × 7½″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. No. 354]
[Illustration: Plate XXI
LUCERNE
CIRCA 1840-41. SIZE 12⅛″ × 9-3/16″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. No. 288]
[Illustration: Plate XXII
A SWISS LAKE
CIRCA 1840-41. SIZE 11⅜″ × 9″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF SIR HICKMAN BACON, BART.]
[Illustration: Plate XXIII
BELLINZONA: FROM THE SOUTH
CIRCA 1840-41. Size 12⅞″ × 8⅞″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. No. 764]
[Illustration: Plate XXIV
BELLINZONA: FROM THE ROAD TO LOCARNO
CIRCA 1840-41. SIZE 11½″ × 9″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. No. 84]
[Illustration: Plate XXV
LAUSANNE: FROM LE SIGNAL
CIRCA 1842-43. SIZE 13″ × 9″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate XXVI
LAUSANNE
CIRCA 1842-43. SIZE 14½″ × 9-13/16″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. No. 824]
[Illustration: Plate XXVII
ZURICH
CIRCA 1840-44. SIZE 12½″ × 9-3/16″
IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. No. 287]
[Illustration: Plate XXVIII
THE SEELISBERG: MOONLIGHT
CIRCA 1842-43. SIZE 11″ × 9″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate XXIX
SCHAFFHAUSEN: THE TOWN
CIRCA 1843-45. SIZE 18½″ × 13½″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF R. BROCKLEBANK, ESQ.]
[Illustration: Plate XXX
TELL’S CHAPEL, FLUELEN
CIRCA 1845. SIZE 11⅝″ × 9″
FROM THE COLLECTION OF W. G. RAWLINSON, ESQ.]
FOOTNOTES:
[A] “Biographies of the Great Artists--J. M. W. Turner, R.A.,” Sampson
Low, 1897, p. 27. Of the many biographies of Turner, this, although
slight, gives probably the best and truest view of him and his work.
[B] Turner’s conception of nature, I may remark, is identical with that
of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who says: “My notion of nature comprehends not
only the forms which nature produces, but also the nature and internal
fabric and organisation ... of the human mind and imagination.”
(Seventh Discourse.)
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