THE SUBLIME--1797-1802
Change from pure form to light and shade--‘Millbank’ and ‘Ewenny
Priory’--Contrast between ‘Ewenny’ and ‘Llandaff’--The transition
from objectivity to subjectivity--The growth of taste for the
Sublime--There are no sublime objects, but only objects of sublime
feeling--No guidance but from art--The Wilson tradition--The two
elements in the sketches and studies of this period, (1) The study
of Nature, and (2) The assimilation of the Wilson tradition--In the
1797 sketches these two operations are kept distinct--The North of
England tour and its record--‘Studies for Pictures: Copies of
Wilson’--The two operations begin to coalesce in the 1798 and 1799
sketches--The origin of ‘Jason’--The Scotch (1801) and Swiss (1802)
tours.
There is an evident connection between such a study of light and shade
as the ‘Interior of a Cottage’ (406 National Gallery) and at least two
of the exhibits in the exhibition of 1797. One of these, the ‘Moonlight,
a study at Millbank,’ was probably Turner’s first exhibited oil
painting; the other, ‘Transept of Ewenny Priory, Glamorganshire,’ I am
inclined to regard as the first drawing in which the budding genius of
the young artist was authoritatively announced. It is impossible to be
sure whether the direction of Turner’s attention to the subtler problems
of light and shade led him to turn to oil painting as a more suitable
medium for the expression of such effects, or whether his resolution to
explore the resources of the more complex medium had the effect of
directing his attention to the expressional qualities of light and
shade. The ‘Millbank’ bears on its face the evidence of Dutch influence
(Van der Neer, Van Goyen, etc.) as well as of inexperience of the
technical requirements of the new medium. This inexperience renders the
work
[Illustration: _PLATE IX_
INTERIOR OF RIPON CATHEDRAL: NORTH TRANSEPT
PENCIL. 1797]
insignificant with regard to the development of the artist’s
personality, but the bent of his mind towards the mystery and
expressiveness of darkness is notable.
In the water-colour of ‘Ewenny Priory’--now one of the chief treasures
of the Cardiff Art Gallery (Pyke-Thompson Bequest)--Turner’s genius is
less hampered by technical difficulties. If this be indeed the drawing
that was exhibited in 1797[7] it shows an amazingly rapid development in
the artist’s powers, especially when we compare it with the ‘Llandaff
Cathedral’ (790, National Gallery), which was exhibited only twelve
months earlier. The ‘Llandaff’ is merely the work of a clever and
skilful topographical draughtsman, the ‘Ewenny’ is the work of a
powerful imaginative artist. The gloomy interior of the Norman ruin is
no longer an object to be measured, dated, classified and labelled. It
is no longer an ‘interesting specimen’ that we have set before us. The
artist has now broken with the ordinary, every-day world of
sense-experience, and we plunge with him into the world of the
imagination, where objects are no longer separated from and held over
against the self; they now throb and tingle with our own emotional life.
This change of aim--we may speak of it for the sake of brevity as the
change from objectivity to subjectivity--is accompanied by a change of
method in the workmanship of the two drawings. In the ‘Llandaff’ (as in
the ‘Lincoln’) the forms of all the objects are made out with the
greatest possible clearness. When the artist has told us as clearly and
precisely as possible the exact shape of every object from his chosen
point of view, we feel that he has done all that he set out to do, and
all that we can reasonably demand from him. Then these objects are left
standing side by side in relative independence of each other and of us;
they have no necessary connection one with the other, like the parts of
a piece of music, or the points of an argument. Their only bond of union
is the abstract one of space. The whole effect is of something severed
from direct experience; the objects represented have an unreal air of
permanence and immutability, with something of the intellectual coldness
and aloofness of a diagram or mathematical symbol.
In the ‘Ewenny’ drawing we are brought into contact with objects which
have not yet been severed from the emotional colouring of immediate
experience. Instead of a series of abstract spatial determinations,
appealing only to the abstract understanding, we now have a presentation
fraught with the infinite suggestiveness of living, sensible experience.
Each object represented is now no longer held over against the self as
something alien, something indifferent to and independent of humanity,
like the laws of the physical sciences; each object has now become
merely a moment in the affective life of an individual. It therefore
touches our own feelings, challenges our hopes and fears, appeals
intimately to our sympathies with the contagion of the emotions of an
actual companion. We cannot remain indifferent to such an appeal if we
would. Unless our nerves tingle as the eye plunges from the familiar
objects of the foreground into the gloom beyond, the picture has not
begun to exist for us. But immediately it touches our inner life into
responsive activity the picture becomes transformed from so much
indifferent paper and pigment into an aspect of our own affective life.
We have caught the contagion of the artist’s emotional experience, in
which the objects of his representation were submerged.
I am far from wishing to suggest that the distinction between the two
kinds of art which I have endeavoured to indicate is either very obvious
or easy to grasp. But it is, I am convinced, a very real and a very
weighty distinction, and as such is worthy of the most careful study.
But, however carefully we study the matter, and however profoundly
convinced we may be that the distinction is firmly grounded in the
essential nature of art itself, yet we can never hope to describe it in
the precise terms of the exact sciences. We can never hope to understand
the exact nature of the ties which bind the expressive symbols of
Romantic art to the echoes they awaken with mathematical certainty in
the breast of each individual. The problem of the relation between
thought and feeling still agitates the rival schools of philosophy, and
this is not the place to discuss such matters. What is immediately
important
[Illustration: _PLATE X_
CONWAY FALLS, NEAR BETTWYS-Y-COED
WATER COLOUR, ABOUT 1798]
for us is to see that Turner’s art has passed from one stage of growth
to another, and to realise for ourselves as best we can the nature of
this progression. To me it seems clear that the line of Turner’s
personal development is following roughly the line upon which the
artistic faculty of mankind has developed; that the transition from
topography to the stage we have now entered upon coincides in part with
the movement from Classic to Romantic art, from the art which is in
bondage to the world of external reality, to the art which moves and has
its being in the inner world of our ideas and feelings. The ‘Llandaff’
and ‘Lincoln’ belong to the classic (or the pseudo-classic, if you will)
art of the eighteenth century, while the ‘Ewenny’ inaugurates the
Romantic art of the nineteenth century. On its technical side the change
is from form to tone, from a system of predominantly unemotional
space-determinations to a medium which is more immediately in contact
with the inward feeling of all self-conscious beings.
In moving from the Augustan point of view towards the Romantic, Turner
was but walking in an already well-beaten track. During the last
half-century the influence of Milton had been growing, the taste for the
gloomy, the mysterious and the picturesque had found expression in
Young’s _Night Thoughts_, in Gray’s _Elegy_, in Walpole’s _Castle of
Otranto_, and had found critical exponents in Warton’s _History of
English Poetry_, and in Burke’s Essay _On the Sublime and Beautiful_,
(1756). Dr. Percy’s _Reliques_ had found many readers and admirers, and
Macpherson’s _Ossian_ had stirred the enthusiasm of Europe. In painting
Richard Wilson and De Loutherbourg had struck the same note of gloomy
grandeur.
Now the essence of this kind of art--the Sublime--is not merely to
strike the spectator dumb with amazement or terror, but also to make him
feel that man’s moral freedom is superior to the most terrible forces of
Nature.[8] The mere representation of the fearful and terrible sights of
inorganic nature is therefore not by itself enough to evoke a feeling of
the sublime; before he can do this the artist must also excite in the
spectator the consciousness of his power to overcome or resist such
objects. It is therefore a purely subjective feeling that the artist
has to represent, though this feeling is directed towards or centred
round a certain definite series of objects. But these objects as
coloured with the strength and resolution of the heroic mood--the mood
of Kant’s _animi strenui_[9]--cannot properly be said to exist as
natural objects. The real subject of the artist’s work is therefore,
strictly speaking, the invisible and the intangible, a mere mood of the
soul, an attitude of our own mind towards certain objects of thought.
Of course we should all have been justified before the feat had been
accomplished, in declaring that it was impossible for pictorial art to
paint the invisible, but now that it has been accomplished we have no
alternative but to recognise the fact. Common-sense says the thing is
impossible, and experience proves to us that common-sense is wrong. The
careful student of modern criticism will know how splendidly Mr. Ruskin
fought against experience in this matter and how he was worsted. I am
really sorry for common-sense. To paint the invisible and intangible--it
is a hard nut to crack. But I protest we have no choice in the matter.
The thing is there before us. It is a pity it is not quite so simple and
easy as we should like it to be, but it is best, I think, to face the
difficulties honestly.
Turner’s problem, then, as a painter of the sublime, was one in which
the mere study of natural objects could not help him. He might search
out the most fearful sights in nature, watch the loftiest waterfall of
the mightiest river, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction,
hurricanes, lightning flashes and storms, but these objects alone,
though they might stimulate his feeling of moral freedom, could not show
him how to express this faculty of moral resistance which ‘gives us,’ as
Kant says, ‘the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent
almightiness of nature.’[10] There was no help for Turner in this task
but in the works of those artists who had succeeded in expressing such
emotions, and it was to Wilson and De Loutherbourg that Turner went, not
to learn how to represent natural objects as such, but to learn how to
use such objects as the media of inward perceptions and ideas. De
Loutherbourg’s influence was mainly in the direction of rhodomontade and
melodrama, but Wilson’s, though not
[Illustration: _PLATE XI_
CONWAY CASTLE
PENCIL. ABOUT 1798]
devoid of danger, led Turner safely into the enchanted regions of
romance.
The three chief expressive--as distinguished from
representative--factors in Wilson’s work are darkness of tone, the
scheme of colour, and the quality of the paint. I am inclined to think
that the general darkness of Wilson’s pictures is the necessary result
of the kind of subjects he treated. The darkness is necessary to tune
the mind of the spectator to gloomy and tragic thoughts,--to spread over
his mind what Johnson calls ‘a general obscurity of sacred horror, that
oppresses distinction, and disdains expression.’ In his worst pictures
this darkness of key readily passes into emptiness and blackness; but in
his best pictures this darkness ranges through a gamut of subdued and
glowing colour, which relieves the gloom and comforts us as it were in
our distress. The tone and colour are thus to some extent determined by
the character of the objects represented; the tone by their general
emotional effect, and the colour scheme as conditioned by the tone,
though controlled within rather wide limits by the natural colours of
the objects represented. But the third element, the quality of the
paint, seems altogether independent of the objects represented. It seems
to reveal only the artist’s attitude towards these objects. It is as
thoroughly subjective as the emotional vibration in the voice of an
excited speaker. Under this term, the quality of the paint, I include
all the immediate presentative elements of painting, the thickness or
thinness of the impasto, the way the paint is put on, the signs of the
brushwork, everything, in short, that tells us how the artist felt
towards the objects he was representing.
The main object of Turner’s study during the period we are dealing with
was the assimilation of the Wilson tradition, his study of the facts of
Nature, simply as facts, falling into the second place. For a time the
two lines of study are kept distinct. On the one hand, the work of neat
and systematic note-taking face to face with nature is continued, and on
the other hand, a number of studies aiming at the embodiment of the
artist’s subjective attitude make their appearance. The final synthesis
of the two factors, the without and the within, is of course only
arrived at in the finished work of art, but the contents of the
sketch-books of this period fall easily apart, according as they lean
either in the direction of the particular facts or in the direction of
the emotional synthesis.
The drawings made during the tour in the north of England, which Turner
made in the summer of 1797, belong almost entirely to the first kind. In
one sketch-book we find most of the more important ruined abbeys and
castles of Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland drawn with the most
delightful ease, accuracy, and charm. Here we have Kirkstall Abbey drawn
from every available point of view, Ripon Cathedral, studied both
without and within, Barnard and Richmond Castles, Dunstanborough,
Bamborough, Durham Castle and Cathedral, Warkworth, Lindisfarne and
Norham. The drawing of the interior of Ripon Cathedral, reproduced as
Plate IX., is merely an average example of the kind of work that Turner
now seemed to produce without the slightest effort. The most complicated
structure and detail now presented no difficulties to his well-trained
eye and hand. The ease with which he mastered all the material forms
that met his eye may have left his mind at leisure to enjoy the moral
atmosphere of the buildings, may have left his imagination free to range
backward over its past history; but there is no trace of emotion or
imagination in the graceful play of these clear-cut, accurate, and
methodical outlines.
Melrose Abbey formed the highest point north in this journey. Leaving
Melrose, Turner struck across to Cumberland, no doubt passing through
Carlisle to Keswick. After the bustle and noise of much of the northward
half of his journey, the peace and quiet of the English lakes must have
been noticeable. In looking through the hundred or more pencil sketches
made at Keswick, Buttermere, Ullswater, Patterdale, Windermere,
Coniston, etc., one is struck by the absence of the conventional note of
Romantic horror. There is no trace of what used to be called the bold
and appalling singularities of nature.[11] There is indeed a marked
absence of human activity in these drawings. We are alone with
[Illustration: _PLATE XII_
RUINED CASTLE ON HILL
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1798]
nature, but nature’s aspect is generally peaceful and friendly. The
mountains are high, but we enjoy climbing them and the fine views we get
there. Their shapes above all interest us immensely. They do not strike
us at all as appalling singularities, but as replete with an infinite
grace and variety, under which we feel a fundamental reasonableness, an
intuitive sense of intelligible design. And then there are not only the
bare shapes, but their wonderful clothing of light and shade; the play
of the gleams of sunlight and the long shadows across the deep bosoms of
the hills, and the games the wreaths of mist and cloud play with the
distant mountain-tops, and the wild races of the mountain-torrents over
their favourite tracks. Occasionally there is time for more than the
regulation pencil outline. Then the brush and a few colours come out,
and a stretch of the distance wakes from its cold abstraction into life.
Such sketches as ‘The Head of Derwentwater, with Lodore Falls and the
entrance to Borrowdale,’ the ‘Hills of Glaramara,’ and ‘Buttermere Lake’
(Exhibited Drawings, No. 696), were produced in this way. In these we
see beautiful effects of mist, with the sun playing through them, noted
with subtle sympathy and accuracy, but the general effect is not at all
gloomy; it is rather one of peace, serenity, and gladness.
This is the raw material out of which Turner set to work in the autumn
and winter of 1797 to manufacture some important oil pictures full of
gloom and wrath. The young artist reminds me of Johnson’s acquaintance
who had resolved to be a philosopher, but found his native cheerfulness
always breaking through. Turner’s unaffected delight in Nature certainly
stood in the way of his aspiration towards the sublime. But he was not a
man to be easily thwarted. We can trace in the pictures exhibited in
1798 the conflict between the elements given in perception and the
subjective requirements of the artist, but by sheer diligence and
strength of will he succeeded in moulding his cheerful perceptions into
concepts full of gloom and horror. The picture of ‘Buttermere’ (N.G., at
present on loan to the Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter) is based on a
pale and delicately-charming water-colour drawing (696, N.G.), but
little of the charm or delicacy of the original sketch survives in the
oil painting, which is ruthlessly swamped in more than Wilsonian
blackness. He succeeded best where the record of his perceptions was
slightest. There are several sketches of Norham Castle, but they are all
in pencil and very slight. For some reason or other the artist was
evidently in a hurry. Perhaps partly because of this insufficient
note-taking, here was a favourable subject round which his imagination
was free to play, unhampered by any very clearly determined immediate
perceptions. The picture of Norham Castle, exhibited at Somerset House
in 1798, was Turner’s first distinct success in this kind of work, and
he repeated the subject several times.
A small green-covered pocket-book, which still bears Turner’s label,
‘Studies for Pictures: Copies of Wilson,’ gives us a glimpse of the
processes by which the sights of nature were converted into works of
art. Here we see the subjective impulses of the artist struggling into
expression; the artist’s love of gorgeous colour and dramatic effect
nourishing itself and forging a material form for its own support. Among
the designs in this interesting little book are several marine and coast
subjects, a shipwreck, an interior of a forge with men busy casting an
anchor, some river scenes, a rainbow standing over a dark city, several
church interiors, and some studies of turbulent skies. It is difficult
to distinguish Turner’s studies for his own pictures from his copies of
Wilson, but one of the drawings is probably a copy of Wilson’s
‘Morning,’ and another, of his ‘Bridge of Augustus at Rimini.’ I have
not been able to see either of these original pictures, so as to compare
them with Turner’s copy, but a comparison of the copy with the engraving
by Joseph Farington, published by Boydell, shows some important
discrepancies in the arrangement of the light and shade. The character
of these discrepancies leads one to suppose that they were not made
intentionally by Turner, but were the result of his attempt to reproduce
the general effect of the picture from memory. He may have made a slight
pencil sketch of the picture in some gallery, and washed in the general
effect afterwards from memory.
This is, of course, only a supposition, but it is somewhat strengthened
by examination of a larger and more elaborate copy of Wilson’s
‘Landscape with Figures,’ a picture now in the National Gallery (No.
1290). That Turner’s water-colour is intended to be a copy is proved by
the endorsement on its back--‘Study from Wilson,’
[Illustration: _PLATE XIII_
STUDY OF FALLEN TREES
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1798]
[Illustration: _PLATE XIV_
CAERNARVON CASTLE.
PENCIL. 1799]
but when we compare it with the original we find that the various
discrepancies in the copy can only be accounted for by supposing that
Turner was working to a considerable extent from memory. I admit the
evidence is not conclusive, but I do not think we shall be far wrong if
we take it that Turner did not at this time make any elaborate copies of
Wilson’s pictures, but that he studied them closely and
enthusiastically, and relied more upon his memory than his notes.
In the sketches made during the following years we find that these two
separate operations show a tendency to coalesce. Turner has evidently
taken a dislike to his earlier map-making style, and tries hard to see
nature like Wilson. His sketches from nature become slighter and more
hurried. In his efforts towards breadth he comes very near emptiness,
and in his attempts to get away from his neat bit-by-bit style of work
he often comes near downright clumsiness and carelessness.
The summers of 1798 and 1799 were largely spent in North Wales. Here he
found exactly the material that chimed in with the mood of sternness and
gloom he wished to express: steep, convulsive mountains, wild valleys
and broken passes, the bare skeletonlike ribs of broken ships aground on
lonely estuaries, massive ruins of huge castles perched on inaccessible
crags, gnawed to the bone as it were by the wind and rain and
remorseless Time.
His mental grasp has clearly broadened. He no longer sees buildings as
isolated objects, but they now fall into their places as incidents in
the wide panorama of the country. Nothing is now drawn for itself; the
trees are emanations from the ground, the dry land and the waters are
kinsmen, the stones in the foreground are parts of the distant
mountains, and the mountains huge elder brothers of the pebbles by the
river-side. The bubbling waters are but clouds made captive, the clouds
the freed souls of the brooks, the trees the organ of their
transformation; and castles like Conway, standing with their roots
plunged deep into their rocky foundations, seem but rocks raised to a
higher power. The distinction between human art and physical nature is
everywhere broken down. The spirit of life in nature is identified with
the volitions and passions of the artist’s own soul: he has become
sensible ‘to the moods of time and season, to the moral power, the
affections and the spirit of the place.’[12]
This state of mind is closely akin to the mood in which the myths of the
Old World had taken shape. Small wonder, then, if the broken and
withered branches of a stricken tree writhing among vigorously shooting
brushwood should suggest to Turner’s mobile fancy the idea of snakes and
dragons. The sketch here reproduced (Plate XIII.) strikes me as probably
the origin of the picture of ‘Jason’ which was exhibited in 1802.
In 1800 or 1801 Turner made a tour through the Highlands of Scotland.
The immediate results were slightly disappointing, but the experience
gained undoubtedly contributed to the effectiveness of the work done
during the first visit to Switzerland, made in 1802. In the Scotch
sketches Turner had hit upon a method of working that enabled him to
cover a great deal of ground in a short space of time, and which had the
additional advantage of exercising his memory, and of making his
sketches from nature more like the first draughts of his finished
pictures than like so many unfused notes or memoranda. All the more
promising scenes he met with were sketched slightly in chalk upon large
sheets of paper prepared with a wash of light brown. These sketches were
seldom carried far before the actual scenes, but as soon after as was
convenient--possibly at the inn in the evening--these skeletons were
filled up from the artist’s retentive memory and ever-ready invention.
In this way he was able to fortify himself against the multiplicity of
nature’s irrelevant facts, and to find a ready form of expression for
the reaction of his own mind upon the sights of nature.
Colour was very little used in the Scotch sketches, all the larger
drawings--numbering, I think, between forty and fifty--being worked
entirely in black and white. But a considerable number of the Swiss
drawings are coloured, though, I believe, none of them directly from
nature. Turner’s procedure in the case of these drawings appears to have
been practically the same as with the Scotch series, but after the
skeleton sketch from nature had been elaborated with pencil and white
and black chalk, colour was sometimes resorted to, less as a record of
facts
[Illustration: _PLATE XV_
CASSIOBURY: NORTH WEST VIEW
FRENCH. ABOUT 1800.]
[Illustration: _PLATE XVI_
BLAIR’S HUT ON THE MONTANVERT AND MER DE GLACE
WATER COLOUR. 1802]
of local colour, than as an additional instrument of expression of the
subjective mood. Among the drawings elaborated in this way are the
sketches upon which several of the Farnley drawings (the large ‘Mer de
Glace, Chamounix,’ ‘Falls of the Reichenbach,’ ‘Pass of St. Gothard,’
‘Blair’s Hut, Mer de Glace,’[13] etc.), were based. In some cases the
finished works are less impressive than the first sketches, which are
almost overpowering in their concentrated vehemence and gloomy majesty.
But we must beware of regarding these as simple sketches from nature.
They are more strictly studies for pictures than sketches from nature,
and it is hardly too much to say that they owe more of their energetic
emotional appeal to the Wilson tradition, which Turner had by this time
thoroughly assimilated, than to the immediate inspiration of nature.