YORKSHIRE AND THE YOUNG ACADEMICIAN.
1797 TO 1807.
From the facts of the foregoing chapter it may be fairly presumed that
although Turner’s election as Associate in 1799 followed quickly after
his fine display of pictures from the northern counties in 1798, he was
before this a marked man, whose superiority over all then living
landscape painters was visible to critics and lovers of art, and could
not have been disguised from the eyes of the artists of the Royal
Academy. It did not require a genius like that of Turner to distance
competitors on the Academy walls in those days. England was almost at
its lowest point both in literature and art. The great men of the
earlier part of the eighteenth century, Pope, Thomson, Gray, Collins,
Swift, Fielding, Sterne and Richardson, had long been dead, and of the
later brilliant, but small circle of artists and men of letters of which
Dr. Johnson was the centre (Goldsmith and Burke, Garrick and Reynolds,
Hume and Gibbon), Reynolds only was left, and he was moribund. Of other
artists with any title to fame there was none left but De Loutherbourg
and Morland; Hogarth had died in 1764, Wilson in 1782, Gainsborough in
1788. The new generation of men of genius were born; some were growing
up, some in their cradles. A few had already shown signs. Wordsworth and
Coleridge had just put forth their “Lyrical Ballads” at Bristol, Burns
was famous in Scotland, Charles Lamb had written “Rosamund Gray,” but
Scott the “Great Unknown,” was as yet “unknown” only, though five years
older than Turner; Byron had not gone to Harrow, and the united ages of
Keats and Shelley did not amount to ten years; the only living poets of
deserved repute were Cowper and Crabbe. Della Crusca in poetry, and West
in art, were the bright particular stars of this gloomy period. The
landscape painters who were Academicians were such men as Sir William
Beechey, Sir Francis Bourgeois, Garvey, Farington, and Paul Sandby, and
among the Associates, Turner had no more important rival than Philip
Reinagle. Girtin and De Loutherbourg alone of all the then exhibitors
were anything like a match for him, and Girtin spoilt (till 1801) any
chance he might otherwise have had of Academic honours by not exhibiting
pictures in oil; he died in 1802, leaving Turner undisputed master of
the field. It is not greatly therefore to be wondered at that Turner was
elected Associate in 1799, and a full Academician in 1802. It was,
however, much to the credit of the Academy that they recognized his
talent so soon and welcomed him as an honour to their body, instead of
keeping him out from jealous motives. Turner never forgot what he owed
to the Academy, and whether it taught him nothing, as Mr. Ruskin says,
or a great deal, as Mr. Hamerton thinks, does not much matter--it taught
him all it knew, and gave him ungrudgingly every honour in its gift. But
its claims on his gratitude did not stop here, for it was his school in
more than one branch of learning; from its catalogues he derived the
subjects of most of his pictures, they directed him to the poems which
set flame to his imagination, and helped (unfortunately), with their
queer spelling and grammar and truncated quotations, to form what
literary style he had; but the greatest boon which the Academy afforded
was the opportunity of fame, a field for that ambition which was one of
the ruling powers of his nature.
But his tour in the North in 1797 was before his days of Academic
rivalries and glories. He was only two-and-twenty, and seems to have
been actuated by no motive but to paint as well and truly as he could
the beautiful scenery through which he passed. The effect upon him of
the fells and vales of Yorkshire and Cumberland seems to have been much
the same as that of Scotland upon Landseer; it braced all his powers,
developed manhood of art, turned him from a toilsome student into a
triumphant master. Mr. Ruskin writes more eloquently than truly about
this first visit. “For the first time the silence of nature around him,
her freedom sealed to him, her glory opened to him. Peace at last, and
freedom at last, and loveliness at last; it is here then, among the
deserted vales--not among men; those pale, poverty-struck, or cruel
faces--that multitudinous marred humanity--are not the only things which
God has made.” These are fine words, but what a picture, if true! Can
this young man who has travelled through all these many counties in
England and Wales, which we have already enumerated, never have known
the “silence of nature,” or “freedom,” or “peace,” or “loveliness?” Can
his experience of mankind, of Dr. Monro, of Girtin, of Mr. Hardwick, of
Sir Joshua Reynolds, of Mr. Henderson, have left upon him such an
impression of the failure of God’s handiwork in making men, that a
mountain seems to him in comparison as a revelation of unexpected
success? If Turner had been cooped in a garret of the foulest alley in
London since his birth, and had only escaped now and then from the
hardest drudgery to read the works of Mr. Carlyle, this picture might be
near the truth, but we doubt even then if it could escape the charge of
being over-coloured.
Whether Turner had any special object in this journey to the North in
1797 is not clear, but it is at least probable that Girtin’s success at
the Exhibition of this year with his drawings from Yorkshire and
Scotland may have influenced him, and that he may have already received
a commission from Dr. Whitaker to make drawings for the “Parish of
Whalley,” published three years afterwards. He must at all events have
had much leisure from other employment in order to produce the important
pictures in oil and water-colour which he exhibited the next year. Of
these we only know _Morning on the Coniston Fells_ and _Buttermere
Lake_, now in the National Gallery. Another, whether water or oils we do
not know, was _Norham Castle on the Tweed--Summer’s Morn_, the first of
several pictures of the same subject, which was a favourite of his for a
good reason. Many years after (probably about 1824 or 1825), when making
sketches for “Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of
Scotland, with descriptive illustrations by Sir Walter Scott, 1826,” he
took off his hat to Norham Castle, and Cadell the publisher, who was
with him, expressed surprise. “Oh,” was the reply, “I made a drawing or
painting of Norham several years since. It took; and from that day to
this I have had as much to do as my hands could execute.” If the Castle
was treated in the same way in this first as in the subsequent pictures
of Norham, with the hill and ruin in the middle distance set against a
brightly illumined sky, the effect was sufficiently new and striking to
make the reputation of any painter in those days. It was an effect which
as far as we know had never been attempted before, this casting of the
whole shadow of hill and castle straight at the spectator, so that, in
spite of the bright reflections in the watery foreground, he seems to be
within it, and to see through the soft shadowy air, the solemn bulk of
mound and ruin, with their outlines blurred with light, grand and
indistinct against the burning sky.
[Illustration: NORHAM CASTLE, ON THE TWEED.]
The pictures of 1797-99 confirmed beyond any doubt that a great artist
had arisen, who was not only a painter but a poet--a poet, not so much
of the pathos of ruin, though so many of his pictures had ruins in them,
nor of the chequered fate of mankind, though there is something of the
“Fallacies of Hope” indicated in the quotations to his pictures--as of
the mystery and beauty of light, of the power of nature, her
inexhaustible variety and energy, her infinite complexity and fulness.
No one can look upon his splendid drawing of _Warkworth Castle_,
exhibited in 1799, and now at South Kensington, with its rich glow of
sunset and transparent shadow, and its wonderful masses of clouds,
without feeling that such work as this was a revelation in those days.
Sparing and not very pleasant in colour, it is yet in this respect a
great advance upon the former work of others and of his own; such colour
as there is penetrates the shade and is complete in harmony and tone,
while the sky has no blank space and is part of the picture, the
vivifying uniting power of the composition, with more interest and
feeling in one roll of its truly-studied masses of cloud-form than could
be found in the whole of any sky of his contemporaries.
Altogether it is difficult to over-estimate the influence of this first
journey to the North upon Turner’s mind and art, although he had almost
perfected his skill and shown unmistakable signs of genius before. But
these tours had other gifts not less important, though in a different
way, for his introductions to Dr. Whitaker, the local historian, to Mr.
Basire, the engraver, to Mr. Fawkes of Farnley, to Lord Harewood, and to
Sir John Leicester (afterwards (1826) Lord de Tabley), through Mr.
Lister-Parker of Browsholme Hall, his guardian, may all be said to have
resulted from this tour.
Dr. Whitaker was the vicar of the parish of Whalley, and was writing a
book upon it in the manner of those days, giving descriptions of the
local antiquities, the churches, the ruins, the crosses, and an account
of the county families, with their pedigrees and engravings of their
ancestral seats. Not only each county, but almost every parish had such
a historian in those days, and although the spirit of these works is
archaeological rather than artistic, engaged with genealogy rather than
history, and with pride of family and county rather than of the people
and nation, they did a great deal of valuable work. Dr. Whitaker’s work
is no exception to this rule, and he was in many ways a typical writer
of the kind, for he himself, though he “chose” the Church as his
profession, was a man of property and county importance. Valuable as
artists were in those days to the writers of these works, they were yet
considered of very secondary rank. They were indeed not called “artists”
but “draftsmen,” and notwithstanding that Dr. Whitaker recognized
Turner’s genius, he did not think it necessary in this “Parish of
Whalley” to mention in the preface the existence of such a person,
although the names of all the gentlemen of the county who had furnished
him with drawings or information are carefully acknowledged therein; but
nothing will show better the relations between the two men than an
extract from a letter from the reverend bookmaker to one of his county
friends, Mr. Wilson, of Clitheroe, dated Feb. 8th, 1800.
“I have just had a ludicrous dispute to settle between Mr. Townley”
(Charles Townley, Esq. of Townley), “myself and Turner, the
draftsman. Mr. Townley it seems has found out an old and very bad
painting of Gawthorpe at Mr. Shuttleworth’s house in London, as it
stood in the last century, with all its contemporary accompaniments
of clipped yews, parterres, &c.: this he insisted would be more
characteristic than Turner’s own sketch, which he desired him to
lay aside, and copy the other. Turner, abhorring the landscape and
contemning the execution of it, refused to comply, and wrote to me
very tragically on the subject. Next arrived a letter from Mr.
Townley, recommending it to me to allow Turner to take his own way,
but while he wrote, his mind (which is not unfrequent) veered
about, and he concluded with desiring me to urge Turner to the
performance of his requisition, as from myself. I have, however,
attempted something of a compromise, which I fear will not succeed,
as Turner has all the irritability of youthful genius.”[19]
The “compromise” was handing over the task of drawing from the
objectionable picture to Mr. J. Basire the engraver.
We should like to see Turner’s “tragical” letter, and also his rejected
drawing; we should also like to have seen Dr. Whitaker’s face if he had
been told that not many years after a book would have been published of
drawings by Turner, the draftsman, with “descriptions by the Rev. Dr.
Whitaker.”
Of Mr. Fawkes, of whose hall at Farnley Turner made a drawing for the
“Parish of Whalley,” but with whom he is said by Thornbury to have
become acquainted about 1802, it may be said that he was one of Turner’s
longest and staunchest friends. The number of drawings (still at
Farnley) which he made when visiting Mr. Fawkes between 1803 and 1820
(including as they do studies of birds shot while he was there, of the
outhouses, porches, and gateways on the property, of the old places in
the vicinity, and of the rooms in Farnley Hall) attest the frequency of
his visits and his affection for the place and its occupants, while the
splendid series of drawings in England, Switzerland, Italy, and on the
Rhine, and the few precious oil pictures purchased by Mr. Fawkes, show
him to have been not only a true friend, but a warm and sympathizing
admirer of his genius. He indeed was a friend such as few are permitted
to know--one of a goodly number who in Turner’s youth and manhood should
have made the world to him specially pleasant and sociable, frank and
healthy. If he could not or would not have it so, it was not from
insensibility, for his feeling was deep and his heart was sound. “He
could not make up his mind to visit Farnley after his old friend’s
death,” and he could not speak of the shore of the Wharfe (on which
Farnley Hall looks down) “but his voice faltered.” Dayes wrote of him in
1804, “This man must be loved for his works, for his person is not
striking, nor his conversation brilliant.” At Farnley, as at Mr. Wells’
cottage, Turner was made at home, but that he did not escape
good-humoured ridicule even at Farnley is plain from a caricature by Mr.
Fawkes, “which is thought by old friends to be very like. It shows us a
little Jewish-nosed man in an ill-cut brown tail coat, striped
waistcoat, and enormous frilled shirt, with feet and hands notably
small, sketching on a small piece of paper, held down almost level with
his waist.”[20] It is evident that at this time, in spite of his clear
little blue eyes, and his small hands and feet, his appearance was not
one likely to prepossess women, or to inspire consideration among men,
and that one of the ills from which his painting room afforded a refuge
may have often been a wounded vanity. There can be nothing more
constantly galling to a sensitive man of genius than to feel that his
appearance does not inspire the respect he feels due to him. If he has
eloquence sufficient to command attention, this will not matter so much;
but if he has not even that (and Turner had not), his natural refuge is
solitude, his one absorbing occupation is his art, his only worldly
ambition is to show what is in him, and to compel respect to his genius
through his works.
From the time that Turner became an Associate his struggles, if he can
ever be said to have had any, were over, and many changes took place in
his life and art. He ceased almost entirely from making topographical
drawings for the engravers, limiting his efforts to a heading to the
“Oxford Almanack,” and a few drawings for “Britannia Depicta,” “Mawman’s
Tour,” and some other books, until the commencement of the “Southern
Coast” in 1814. He had in effect emancipated himself from “hackwork,”
and could turn his attention to more congenial and ambitious labour. The
“draftsman” had become the artist, and he showed the improvement in his
position by moving from Hand Court, Maiden Lane, to 64, Harley Street.
In future his exhibited pictures show very few “castles” or “abbeys,”
unless they are the seats of his distinguished patrons, Mr. Beckford of
Fonthill (for whom in 1799 he painted several views of that ill-fated
tower, which might have formed a subject for a canto of Turner’s
“Fallacies of Hope”), Sir J. L. Leicester, and others. His other
castles, Carnarvon, 1800, Pembroke, 1801 and 1806, St. Donat’s, 1801,
and Kilchurn, 1802, were all probably compositions in which local
fidelity was cared for little in comparison with effects of light and
pictorial beauty. How completely he disregarded local fact in the case
of Kilchurn has been very completely shown by Mr. Hamerton, and Mr.
Ruskin says, “Observe generally, Turner never, after this time, 1800,
drew from nature without _composing_. His lightest pencil sketch was the
plan of a picture, his completest study on the spot a part of one.”
Of this period, 1800-1810, Mr. Ruskin says, “His manner is stern,
reserved, quiet, grave in colour, forceful in hand. His mind tranquil;
fixed in physical study, on mountain subject; in moral study, on the
Mythology of Homer, and the Law of the Old Testament.” We wish he had
given his reasons for this last astonishing statement. For those who
only know the working of Turner’s mind through his pictures, it is
bewildering in the extreme, for in these there is no trace that he ever
at any time studied the Law of the Old Testament, and the only classical
pictures of this period, including the plates in the “Liber,” were
_Jason_ and _Narcissus and Echo_. If we include the pictures of 1811, we
get one Homeric subject, _Chryses_, but that has nothing to do with
mythology.
The evidence of Turner’s pictures shows little tranquillity of mind
during this period, but, on the contrary, all the restlessness of
unsatisfied ambition. As he had already pitted himself against, and
beaten all the water-colourists, he now commenced a course of rivalry
against all the oil painters past and present, who came anywhere within
the reach of his art, which he endeavoured to extend far beyond
landscape limits.
His first tilt was probably against De Loutherbourg in 1799 with his
_Battle of the Nile, at ten o’clock, when the l’Orient blew up, from the
station of the gunboats between the battery and Castle of Aboukir_; and
his _Fifth Plague of Egypt_ (1800), his _Army of the Medes destroyed in
the Desert by a Whirlwind_, and _The Tenth plague of Ægypt_ (1802),
probably owed more to De Loutherbourg’s grand but theatrical pictures
and _Eidophusicon_, than to any meditation on the “Law of the Old
Testament.”[21] Of Wilson, though dead, and neglected even when alive,
he continued in active rivalry as late as 1822, when he proposed to Mr.
J. Robinson, of the firm of Hurst and Robinson, to have four of his
pictures (three of which were to be painted expressly for the venture)
engraved in rivalry with Wilson and Woollett. “Whether we can in the
present day,” he writes, “contend with such powerful antagonists as
Wilson and Woollett would be at least tried by size, security against
risk, and some remuneration for the time of painting. The pictures of
ultimate sale I shall be content with; to succeed would perhaps form
another epoch in the English school; and if we fall, we fall by
contending with giant strength.” It is difficult to make out the meaning
of even this short extract from this illiterate composition, but it is
quite plain that the open rivalry with Wilson, which commenced about
1800, had not ceased in 1822.
But he did not confine his rivalries to English painters, or to the
field of landscape art. His long rivalry with Claude commenced with the
“Liber Studiorum” in 1807, that with Vandevelde earlier. His famous
_Shipwreck_ (painted 1805) now in the National Gallery, his perhaps
finer _Wreck of the Minotaur_, painted for Lord Yarborough, and his
_Fishing Boats in a Squall_, painted for the Marquis of Stafford, and
now in the Ellesmere Gallery, besides a fine sea-piece, painted for the
Earl of Egremont, are examples of the latter. The Ellesmere picture was
painted in direct rivalry with one of Vandevelde’s on the same subject,
and both hang together in the Ellesmere Gallery. Of them John Burnet
wrote:--
“The figures (in the Vandevelde) are made out and coloured without
reference to the situation they are in; the sea is beautifully
painted, and the foamy tops of the waves blown off by the wind with
great observation of nature; nevertheless, the whole work looks
little and defined compared with its great competitor. Turner’s
boat is advancing towards the spectator with all sails set, and a
similarity in both pictures is that the sails are prevented from
being too cutting and harsh from their melting into and being
softened by other sails of a similar shape and colour. A small boat
is brought in contact in Turner’s, stowing away fish, which forms
the principal light, if it may be so called, for there is no strong
light in the picture; the lights are of a subdued grey tone even in
the yeasty waves; the shape of the mass of light on the water is
broad, and of a beautiful form; in Vandervelde’s (_sic_) picture it
is spotty and devoid of union with the vessel. In Turner we see an
obscure outlined form in everything, for though the warm tints of
the masses of clouds serve to break down and diffuse the colour of
the sails, their form is disturbed by the handling of his brush. In
comparing the two pictures as works of art, Vandervelde’s must
have the preference as far as priority of composition is concerned;
but Turner has had the boldness to tell the same story, clothing it
with all the grandeur and sublimity of natural representation. The
light and shade is very excellent; the mass of dark sky, brought in
contact with the sail of the advancing boat, is broad in the
extreme.”
[Illustration: THE SHIPWRECK.]
Of his other rivalries at this period, those with the Poussins and
Titian are the most notable. The one produced the famous, and, in spite
of its poorness of colour and conventionality, the magnificent, _Goddess
of Discord choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of
Hesperides_, exhibited at the British Institution in 1806, and now in
the National Gallery; the other, the _Venus and Adonis_, still more
wonderful by reason of the beauty of its colour, its composition, and
the audacity of the attempt. This was bought by Mr. Munro of Novar, and
was lately sold at Christie’s, on the dispersion of the Novar
collection, for £1,942. It is, as far as we know, the only picture in
which he attempted with success to draw the human form on a large scale,
and is certainly one of the best efforts of the English school to rival
the “old masters;” the figures, the dogs, and the glorious vine-clad
bower in which they are set are all worthy of the subject, and make a
picture which reminds one of Titian, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Etty in
about equal proportions.
It is strange that the great sea-pieces we have mentioned were not
exhibited (except perhaps that at Petworth), but the occupation of his
time by these magnificent works of emulation accounts for his doing so
little for the engravers in these years, for they were all probably,
except the _Wreck of the Minotaur_, painted before 1807, when he turned
his attention to his greatest, and perhaps most successful work of the
kind, the “Liber Studiorum.” And here we may remark, that emulation with
Turner, though it may have been a mark of jealousy, was always a token
of respect. Feelings crossed each other in Turner’s mind as colours did
in his works; it is often difficult to know whether his feeling is to be
called noble or base, and the same complexity may be noticed in his
“artistic” motives. When imitating other masters he brought his
knowledge of nature to bear strongly on his work to make it more
natural; when painting a natural scene, he employed all his traditional
study to make it more “artistic.”
By this time, however, he had learnt nearly all that was to be learnt
from art, ancient or modern, in the landscape way, but it was different
with nature. That was a book which he could not exhaust, though he was
never tired of turning over fresh pages. It was almost his only book,
and he began a new chapter about 1801 or 1802, when he made his first
tour on the Continent. Previous to this he must have paid a visit to
Scotland, for the Exhibition of 1802 contained three Scotch views, one
of which was the _Kilchurn_ already mentioned. In 1803 he exhibited no
less than six foreign subjects, of which one was the _Calais Pier_, now
in the National Gallery, another the _Festival upon the opening of the
Vintage of Macon_, in the possession of Lord Yarborough; the others were
_Bonneville, Savoy, with Mont Blanc_; _Chateaux de Michael, Bonneville,
Savoy_; _St. Hugh denouncing vengeance on the Shepherd of Courmayeur in
the Valley of d’Aoust_; and _Glacier and Source of the Arvèron going up
to the Mer de Glace, in the Valley of the Chamouni_.[22] After this
burst of foreign subjects he did not exhibit another scene from abroad
for twelve years, except the _Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen_ (1806),
and content this time with simpler, safer, English, a _View of the
Castle of St. Michael, near Bonneville, Savoy_ (1812). During the next
few years the most important picture, and one of the most beautiful he
ever painted, was the famous _Sun Rising through vapour: Fishermen
cleaning and selling Fish_, exchanged with Sir J. F. Leicester for _The
Shipwreck_, and now in the National Gallery, together with _The
Shipwreck_ and _Spithead: Boat’s Crew recovering an Anchor_, another
fine picture of the Vandevelde class.
In all these years, during which he kept up this constant rivalry with
so many artists, living and dead--and we have not exhausted the list of
them--he was continuing his unresting severe study of nature. For many
more years this was to continue, this double artistic life, the strife
for fame by grand pictures, of which emulation was the motive, the
patient development of his knowledge and power by the close study of
nature. Few who watched his pictures from year to year could have
guessed what a store of beautiful studies of the Alps, about Chamouni,
Grenoble, and the Grande Chartreuse he had lying in his portfolios; few
could imagine that with materials for landscapes of a truthfulness and
an original power never before known, he should prefer to paint pictures
in rivalry with the fames of dead men. Possibly he thought that it was
the nearest way to fame to show the public that he could beat
Vandevelde, Poussin, and the rest of them on their own ground; possibly
he may have been diffident of his power to dispense with their aid in
composition. However this may have been, he chose to ground his fame so.
Even in his “Liber,” he in three years gave only three foreign subjects
out of twenty plates: _Basle_, _Mount St. Gothard_, and the _Lake of
Thun_.
[Illustration: decorative bar]