THE SEA-PAINTER--1802-1809
Connection between marine painting and the sublime--Turner’s first
marine subjects--The ‘Bridgewater sea-piece’--‘Meeting of the
Thames and Medway’--‘Our landing at Calais’ and ‘Calais
Pier’--‘Fishermen upon a Lee Shore’--‘Guisborough Shore’ and
‘Dunbar’ sketch-books--‘The Shipwreck’--‘At the Mouth of the
Thames’--‘The Nore,’ ‘Sheerness,’ etc.--‘Death of Nelson.’
We have studied in the preceding chapter the first phase of Turner’s
genuinely creative work. We have seen the artist tear himself free from
the trammels of the prosaic understanding, with its clear-cut
distinctions between external nature and subjective thought and feeling,
and plunge whole-heartedly into the concrete world of the poetic
imagination. The accomplished draughtsman of the visible has developed
into the perfervid poet of the invisible. Objective reality, as such, is
shattered and trampled ruthlessly underfoot.
‘Woe! woe!
Thou hast destroy’d
The beautiful world
With violent blow
’Tis shiver’d! ’tis shatter’d!
The fragments abroad by a demigod scatter’d!
Now we sweep
The wrecks into nothingness!
Fondly we weep
The beauty that’s gone!
Thou, ’mongst the sons of earth,
Lofty and mighty one,
Build it once more!
In thine own bosom the lost world restore!’
The distinction between percipient and object is brushed aside, and the
external world becomes the medium and the means of manifestation of
inward perceptions and ideas. How far the external world can be built up
again in the bosom of the self-conscious subject depends largely upon
the opportunities and genius of the individual.
In pictures like the ‘Kilgarran Castle,’ ‘Norham Castle,’ and ‘The
Trossachs’--to take perhaps the three most successful works of the kind
of art we have been studying--the mind only partially coalesces with its
objects. Such art only deals with a limited range of subject-matter, and
it treats its objects rather as foils to the contemplative mind than as
having significance and worth in themselves. The terrors of inorganic
nature are not represented for their own sake, but are paraded to mark
the triumph of the moral freedom that rises superior to them. The artist
is therefore forced to do violence to external nature, to subdue it and
degrade it into a symbol of what is antagonistic in his own conscious
experience. Yet by sheer force of artistic treatment all this hostile
and negative matter is brought within the realm of art, and made into an
object in which the self-scrutinising spirit of man finds itself
mirrored.
But the sublime lies only on the threshold of beauty. It succeeds, in so
far as it does attain its effect, only by making extreme demands upon
the acquired culture and reasoning powers of the spectator. The sublime
cannot be adequately represented by any sensuous object, but the very
inadequacy of these objects can stir up and evoke this feeling in the
properly prepared spectator.
There are ampler possibilities of beauty in the realm of the sea
painter. At first sight it may seem that the change is merely a change
from one region of inorganic nature to another, from rocks, torrents and
glaciers, to the stormy and impetuous sea. But if we examine the
substance of Turner’s marine pictures carefully, we find that they
contain elements which lend themselves more readily to a systematic
unity in sensuous form. In his mountainous pieces Turner found room for
very little immediate human interest. Man and his everyday occupations
are banished from the steep and rocky places he chooses to represent, as
incompatible with the gloomy, awe-struck feeling he wishes to evoke. The
only immediate link with the feelings and interests of those for whom
he worked which these pictures contained, was the shattered masonry of a
castle built in the recesses of the past by men long since dead, but
whose purposes and fate still awoke echoes in the historical imagination
of the present. In his marine subjects Turner entered more closely into
relation with the substantive interests of his time. During the
Napoleonic wars the sea had come to be recognised as the chief safeguard
of the nation. The dangers of the sea, the courage and skill of her
sailors, were England’s only bulwarks against the invincible legions of
Napoleon. The gathering of the French armies of invasion along the
shores of Brittany, the flotillas of gun-boats and flat-bottomed boats
safely moored at Boulogne and Ambleteuse, focussed the attention of the
nation upon a point outside the limited and varying interests of the
individual citizen, and united them all in the same community of hopes
and fears. The existence and welfare of the nation were at stake, the
need of self-sacrifice was felt, and the individual became animated with
the common sentiments of the nation. The stress of circumstance woke up
what I may call the merely physical and material nation into a
self-conscious spiritual unity, thinking the same thoughts and throbbing
with the same emotions.
At such a moment the poet’s and the artist’s task is made comparatively
easy. Their individual experiences are charged with a universal import;
their art rises to the dignity of a public function. They have only to
be true to their own impulses to realise the absolute beauty of eternal
life. And it was happily at such a moment in the life of the English
nation that Turner wearied of his ruined castles and terrifying
mountains--of the picturesque in general--and devoted himself to marine
painting.
The list of Turner’s exhibited works shows that he was early drawn to
the sea and sailors. In 1796 he exhibited a drawing called ‘Fishermen at
Sea,’ the next year another entitled ‘Fishermen coming Ashore at Sunset,
previous to a Gale,’ and in 1799 there were two oil pictures, one of
‘The Battle of the Nile,’ and the other of ‘Fishermen Becalmed previous
to a Storm--Twilight.’ I have not, unfortunately, been able to see any
of these works, but some studies and drawings in the National Gallery
made about 1796 show that Turner began his career as a marine painter
under
[Illustration: _PLATE XVII_
STUDY FOR THE “BRIDGEWATER SEA PIECE” PEN AND INK, WASH, AND WHITE CHALK
ON BLUE PAPER. ABOUT 1801]
[Illustration: _PLATE XVIII_
STUDY OF A BARGE WITH SAILS SET
PEN AND INK, WASH, AND WHITE CHALK ON BLUE PAPER. ABOUT 1802]
the marked influence of Rowlandson, George Morland and De Loutherbourg.
There is one animated little drawing with brown ink outlines of sailors
getting some obstreperous pigs on board a small coasting vessel in a
strong gale of wind. Apparently the cart has been driven into the sea
beside the vessel, an impossible feat in such a sea; the sea must also
be too deep for the wheels of the cart to rest on the ground, and if the
wheels touch the bottom there is not enough water for the two boats. But
in spite of these minor defects the subject provides scope for a fine
animated group of men in the cart struggling with the pigs, who have
determined to precipitate themselves into the water rather than go where
they are wanted.
That Turner was not altogether satisfied with his design is proved by
the existence of two other versions of the same subject. In one of these
the motive of the cart in the sea has been abandoned. The cart is now
placed in the foreground on the beach, and the rearing horses and
struggling and shouting men are clearly inspired by Rowlandson’s and De
Loutherbourg’s treatment of similar themes. These drawings are in pencil
outline only, but there is also a rather elaborate water-colour of a
shipwrecked sailor clinging to the rocks, with huge glassy-coloured
waves in the manner of De Loutherbourg.
Turner’s unfamiliarity with the sea no doubt accounted to some extent
for its attraction. His imagination was here free to disport itself
untrammelled by the bonds of experience, and safe from the irksome yoke
of the familiar. When we come to study Turner’s first important
sea-piece, the fine picture in the Bridgewater House collection of
‘Dutch Boats in a Gale: Fishermen endeavouring to put their Fish on
Board’--first exhibited in 1801, we can see how little art is bound to
depend upon the individual artist’s personal experience. Turner had
painted landscapes before he knew the country, and buildings before he
had seen them, so now he paints sea-pieces before he has been to sea.
There is no evidence to show that he had ventured out of sight of land
before 1802, and then it was only to cross the Channel from Dover to
Calais. But before this he had exhibited not only the Bridgewater
picture to which I have referred, but a large ‘Battle of the Nile’
(1799), Lord Iveagh’s superb ‘Fishermen upon a Lee Shore’ (1802), and
the almost equally fine ‘Ships bearing up for Anchorage’ (1802), in the
Petworth gallery.
It is true that he had used to the uttermost the few opportunities which
had fallen in his way of observing the sea from the shore, and that he
had some little experience of ships and sailors in rivers and on the
coast. (See, for example, the series of sketches of boats’ crews towing
men-of-war in the River Usk, in the ‘Cyfarthfa’ Sketch-Book of 1798.)
What direct knowledge of this kind he possessed he naturally used, but
there can be no doubt that the main body of his knowledge as well as
inspiration was derived not at first-hand, but indirectly, at first,
through the pictures of English painters like De Loutherbourg, and
later, through the pictures and drawings of the Dutch sea-painters. The
point is worth the attention of those who treat the close connection
between art and nature which happens to exist just at present as an
inherent characteristic of pictorial art, and make much of this supposed
characteristic in opposition to the freedom of music. When we cease to
keep our attention riveted on the naturalistic art of the present, we
soon find indications that the essential forms of pictorial art are as
much independent constructions of the creative mind as the forms of
music.
In the group of studies for pictures of the sea which are related to the
Duke of Bridgewater’s picture, we see Turner playing with pictorial
forms with as much freedom as a musician plays with his notes. The
horizontal line of the sea, the heaving waves, the masses of light and
dark in the sky, the stolid forms of the big ships, the instability of
the smaller boats,--these are notes which Turner never seems wearied of
evoking, and weaving into ever fresh combinations. The demands of mere
representation count for almost nothing in these entrancing drawings.
The artist draws simply because he loves his artistic symbols, loves
weaving them into designs, and because his gift of melodic invention is
inexhaustible.
The group of drawings to which I refer seems to have been made
originally in a small book, solidly bound in calf. On one of the covers
Turner has printed boldly in ink ‘Studies P,’ and ‘Shipping,’ which
means, doubtless, Studies for Pictures of Shipping. The paper is blue
with a coarse surface, similar to
[Illustration: _PLATE XIX_
FISHERMEN LAUNCHING A BOAT IN A ROUGH SEA
PEN AND INK AND WASH. ABOUT 1802]
[Illustration: _PLATE XX_
STUDY FOR “SUN RISING THROUGH VAPOUR”
BLACK AND WHITE CHALK ON BLUE PAPER. ABOUT 1804]
that commonly used by students in the French ateliers, and known as
Michallet paper. The designs were generally roughly pencilled in, and
were then carried further in pen and ink, with bold washes of Indian
ink. White chalk was also freely used. The book was in use before 1799,
as it contains a number of studies for the painter’s diploma picture of
Dolbadarn Castle. These studies are made in coloured chalks, most of
them still very effective, although they have wasted a good deal of
their force upon the pages that have been pressed down over them. This
is, I believe, one of the few occasions on which Turner has been known
to work in pastel. Doubtless many of the shipping designs were never
carried out, but among them there are studies for the large water-colour
of Carnarvon Castle exhibited in 1800, and for the two water-colours of
Pembroke Castle, one (now belonging to Mrs. Pitt Miller), exhibited in
1801, and the other (the glorious one now belonging to Mr. Ralph
Brocklebank), exhibited in 1806.
But the actual studies for the ‘Bridgewater Sea-piece’ were made in a
much larger book, a book which seems to have been devoted at first to
the purpose of making life studies at the Academy classes. But it
contains only about half a dozen drawings of this kind, while about
sixty pages are devoted to studies of pictures, some historical, like
the ‘Deluge,’ etc., but most of them sea-pieces. The paper is coarse
blue, like the smaller book, the size of the leaves being 17 × 10½
inches, and most of the studies are continued over the two open pages.
Throughout the book one recognises a certain sense of pride and
exaltation in the mere size of the paper, and in the unchecked freedom
with which the artist’s hand and imagination could disport themselves.
One of the earliest studies for the ‘Bridgewater Sea-piece’ represents
simply a straight line of sea with two ships on it in the distance, one
foreshortened, the other in profile. In the extreme distance is a line
of white chalk suggesting a strip of sunlight on a distant coast. The
idea is so bald and empty and so unlike the final result that one would
not connect the study with the picture did it not bear Turner’s
inscription, ‘Duke’s Picture,’ in the margin.
The next study shows that Turner’s mind is occupied with the idea of
filling up the emptiness of the middle distance and foreground. On the
left we have two fishing-boats pitching to the right in shadow, while
the two frigates ride at anchor in the distance, very much as in the
first sketch. The two groups are united simply by the cast shadow on the
water thrown by the fishing-boats in the direction of the frigates
(Plate XVII.).
The next study shows the artist trying to find a more interesting way of
uniting the two groups. Here the two motives are tied together as it
were by a small rowing-boat with men in it half hidden in the trough of
the waves. The group of fishing-boats is also slightly altered, their
sails accentuating their common swaying motion. In this drawing the
various objects are no longer juxtaposed in a seemingly casual or
arbitrary way. A subtle bond of union has sprung up between them. The
rowing-boat rocks the reverse way to that of the large group of sailing
vessels. The two rocking motions reinforce and explain one another. The
movement of each gains in vividness, and they both increase the
intensity of our perception of the steadiness and weight of the boat
riding at anchor out there on the right. In this way the sea comes to
life in its effects, and the design is ready to be transferred to the
canvas and for further elaboration.
This playing with our feelings of equilibrium and movement constitutes
one of the prime factors of Turner’s enjoyment in his earlier
sea-pieces. He is taking possession of his new realm, getting his
sea-legs as it were. We see this plainly in the beautiful little picture
of ‘The Meeting of the Thames and Medway’ in the National Gallery. (This
is a small version of the larger picture now in America. There is also
another equally fine small version in the University Galleries, Oxford.)
The strong heaving wave on which the buoy dances in the foreground sets
the main motive of the picture--the play of wind and waves--clearly
forward. The small boat with the four men in it is flung sideways and
upward. We feel it as the light plaything of the heavy waves. In the
middle distance there are two groups of heavier craft with sails set,
one group, on the left, coming straight towards us, the other group
scudding straight across the picture plane, just about to disappear out
of the frame on the right. The dancing buoy and the light rowing-boat in
the foreground make us feel at once the
[Illustration: _PLATE XXI_
STUDY FOR “THE SHIPWRECK”
PEN AND INK AND WASH. ABOUT 1805]
weight and bulk of these sailing hoys. We feel them settling down in the
mettlesome sea, gripping it tight as a rider grips his horse with his
knees, while they fling out their sails to the wind. They are like
living, panting, quivering animals. In the far distance rides a large
frigate at anchor, and the firm base line of the horizon might stand as
a symbol of the self-possession, strength of will, and unity of the
conscious self, which delights in differences, while never entirely
losing itself in the multifarious maze of experience.
In our sketch-book there are some of the undeveloped germs of this
picture. In these sketches parts of the design have been firmly grasped,
but the whole movement has not yet come to light. In the fine drawing
running across pages 90 and 91, for example, the action of the two
scurrying hoys on the right, together with the rocking boat in the
foreground, is clearly marked. But there is nothing to counterbalance
the swift rush of these boats. If we look at this study with the
remembrance of the final design in our minds we feel there is something
missing. We want the heavy waddling hoys on the left coming towards us,
with their hulls jammed deep in the waves; we want something to give us
a sense of solidity, something, as it were, to hold on to, to steady
ourselves in the sway and rush.
All these trial sketches, this laborious piecing together of the
designs, suggest that Turner was not trying to realise something that he
had actually seen. No doubt this was the case, yet we must not hastily
conclude that he was simply making it all up out of his head, as the
common saying runs. His smaller sketch-books show that he had constantly
watched such scenes. The object of his trial sketches was therefore to
find an adequately expressive form which would do justice to the wealth
of his experience. He was not trying simply to make an abstractly
beautiful composition. His task was rather to knit together into
conceptual unity his wide range of experience, and then to body this
forth in a carefully selected and articulated sequence of sensuous
signs.
But some of the pages of the book in which the sketches referred to
above occur, prove that the well-known picture of ‘Calais Pier’ is in
the main an attempt to realise a scene that Turner had actually
witnessed. On pages 58 and 59 there is a vigorous drawing in black and
white chalk inscribed ‘Our landing at Calais--nearly swampt.’ The packet
boat had evidently had a rough crossing, and now the passengers are
being landed in boats with considerable difficulty. In this sketch the
boat seems to have stuck on the harbour bar, and, beyond, the packet
which the passengers have just left is lowering its mainsail. Another
sketch shows the small boat flung finally on the shore with the
passengers struggling among the surf. The picture is no doubt an attempt
to realise the scene which presented itself immediately on the arrival
of the packet boat, before the passengers began to land. This was
Turner’s general idea, but the composition had to be invented and
appropriate details found to sustain and reinforce the main idea.
This incident occurred in 1802, and we have to go back to the previous
year to find what seem to me the materials used in the construction of
Lord Iveagh’s superb ‘Fishermen upon a Lee-Shore in Squally Weather,’ a
picture that will be fresh in the public mind, as it formed one of the
chief attractions at the exhibition of English pictures at the
Franco-British Exhibition held in London last year (1908). Two little
pocket-books, used during Turner’s journey to the Scotch lakes, are
filled with drawings of the heavy billows of the North Sea thundering on
a lee shore. The first book was used on the Yorkshire coast, the other
on the wild coast between Berwick and Edinburgh. The Yorkshire book
bears Turner’s label, ‘Guisborough Shore,’ on the back. It consists of a
small number of pages of coarse blue paper. These pages are filled with
magnificent impressions of waves dashing against rocks, and of dark,
heavy fishing-boats silhouetted against the foaming white sea. The
‘Liber’ design of the ‘Coast of Yorkshire near Whitby’ (R. 24) was
doubtless suggested on this occasion.
The other book, the ‘Dunbar’ sketch-book as Turner named it, consists of
leaves of stout Whatman coated with washes of a murky pinkish brown. The
advantage of using white paper prepared in this way is, that the artist
can get his lights by simply using his knife to scratch away the
preparation. This book contains sketches of the ruins of Roslin Castle,
the Bass Rock, Tantallon and Dunbar Castles. The wild and disconsolate
scenes
[Illustration: _PLATE XXII_
MEN-OF-WAR’S BOATS FETCHING PROVISIONS (1)
PENCIL ABOUT 1808]
between St. Abb’s Head and Dunbar seem to have deeply impressed Turner’s
imagination. As we turn over the leaves of this book we seem to hear
‘the sombrous and heavy sound of the billows successively dashing
against the rocky beach’ that Scott speaks of in his description of Fast
Castle in the _Bride of Lammermoor_. The artist seems too excited to
draw in his old static fashion. The stretches of sullen sea are sketched
again and again, the white crests of the incoming waves being dug out
furiously with the knife. But only the large masses of light and dark
are indicated. Here we have a stretch of cold light in the sky with the
dark sea and cliffs looming against it, the whole vague and fragmentary,
but irresistibly impressive. But perhaps the most eloquent pages in the
book contain two glorious studies of storm-tossed waves. We are looking
out from the shore, with the waves breaking at our feet. Even in his
more elaborate work Turner has never suggested the tremendous weight and
power of the sea-waves so vividly as in these hurried and tiny sketches.
The furious work with the knife on both sides of the paper has reduced
it almost to a rag; but the rag is eloquent, and such studies as these
help us to understand how it was that Turner could paint the sea so very
much better than any artist either before his time or since.
‘The Shipwreck,’ one of the most successful of Turner’s early
sea-pieces, was painted in 1805. The picture is doubtless a
‘composition’ in which Turner has endeavoured to sum up his knowledge of
the sea, but, as was usual with him, it contains a nucleus of directly
observed fact. These two sides of his art, tireless and the most
searching observation, and the subsequent artistic manipulation of what
he had seen and felt, are clearly displayed for us in two little ragged
paper-covered note-books labelled by the artist ‘Shipwreck’ and
‘Shipwreck 2.’ The first contains the succinct record of an actual
shipwreck, the second the series of trial compositions which he made
before the final design of the picture was fixed.
Eight of the pages of the first book--it only contains sixteen pages in
all--have long been exhibited among the Turner water-colours in the
National Gallery. They are framed together, and numbered 535. They
represent so many different views of a barque going to pieces on the
shore. There can be no doubt of the veracity of these bold, masterly pen
sketches; as Mr. Ruskin says of them, ‘I believe even those who have
not seen a shipwreck, must recognise, by the instinct of awe, the truth
of these records of a vessel’s ruin’ (_Ruskin on Pictures_, p. 221). In
the margin of one of the drawings Turner has scribbled ‘Pepper (?) bargh
Vessel. Hemp. O. Iron bundles like Hoop.’ The scenery vaguely suggests
the coast of Kent to me,--possibly Gravesend.
These sketches are so impressive that one would have thought that Turner
would have been satisfied to take any one of them as a basis for a
picture. But his mind seemed unsatisfied until he had exalted actuality
into something of epic grandeur. The second little book shows how he set
to work to make his pictures express a clearer intention and a wider
mental outlook than any single incident could.
The first sketch shows us a large ship settling down at the bows, with a
single rowing-boat in the foreground. We are far away from the shore.
The tragedy is intensified by taking place on the high seas, but the
presentment is evidently too bare and matter-of-fact for the artist. In
the next sketch the ship is turning over towards us, though slightly to
the right, so that we see its decks plainly, with the masts
foreshortened towards us. Somewhat nearer to us is a welter of boats and
figures, with a fishing-boat with sails set on the right, all placed low
down in the trough of the sea. On page 13, the vessel is turned half
over towards us, but to the left. The fishing-boat in the foreground
sailing into the picture also has its mast and sails sloping violently
to the left. This swing in the same direction of the two most prominent
objects in the design strikes us as monotonous, and doubtless for this
reason excited Turner’s disapproval. On page 16, the vessel is brought
nearer and made a more prominent object in the design. It is now turned
over away from us and slightly to the left. The welter of boats and
figures is placed beyond the vessel, instead of in the foreground. In
another sketch the ship lies on its side helpless on the right of the
design, its masts and rigging in the water stretching right across the
picture. Another of the sketches has been reproduced as Plate XXI. This
is, perhaps, a little more fully realised than some of the others. It
seems to have been drawn straight off in pen and ink, then the stormy
sky and waves were indicated with an impetuous wash of
[Illustration: _PLATE XXIII_
MEN-OF-WAR’S BOAT FETCHING PROVISIONS (2)
PENCIL. ABOUT 1808]
Indian ink, which was then thumbed, dabbed, and coaxed to give the
requisite modelling. The sweep of the waves, their vicious choppy spurts
and explosions of spray, are given with a directness and simplicity of
means that I believe would have excited the admiration of Korin himself.
I need not continue to describe all the pages in detail. The point of
interest is that Turner tried successively every possible movement in
the sinking of a big ship and looked at them from every possible point
of view. Then he finally decided that his second sketch was the most
suggestive and striking, so he took it up again, and after considerable
modification in the details, developed it into the completed work.
Between 1805 and 1809 Turner must have spent a good deal of his time
sailing up and down the lower reaches and the mouth of the Thames. The
contents of several sketch-books prove this. In one there is a view of
the Dutch coast with Flushing in the distance, evidently drawn from the
sea. But the subjects as a rule are nearer home. In the book labelled
‘River and Margate’ the subjects range from the Fishmarket at Hastings
to Cobham and Walton Bridges. These include sketches near London Bridge,
at Purfleet, Greenwich, Gravesend, Southend, Herne Bay, and Margate. But
these are only treated as backgrounds to the ships and boats. We have
pages and pages of wherries and Thames barges bundling along with all
sails set past massive ships of the line at anchor, all drawn as swiftly
as they seem to move. These are almost too slight for reproduction, but
the two animated scenes of men-of-war’s boats victualling, reproduced as
Plates XXII. and XXIII., give an excellent idea of the spirit in which
Turner worked on these occasions. Looking out to sea we see a number of
ships of the line riding at anchor. Round the landing-stages in the
foreground are the ships’ boats taking in stores of bread, hay and
straw, sheep and fish. The day is fine, but there is evidently a wind
blowing; the sea is choppy; there is plenty of spray about, and the
pennants stand out taut from the masts of the big ships in the offing.
It is all drawn with a few hurried, nervous pencil outlines, nothing is
described in detail, yet the whole scene is brought as vividly before us
as the most elaborate oil-painting could bring it.
Another little book, labelled ‘Boats. Ice,’ shows that Turner was no
mere fair weather sailor. The sketches were evidently made during a
severe winter. The book starts off with several lurid sunsets. On page 9
we see some boatmen on their barges, a church, probably Gravesend
Church, in the distance. The sun has disappeared behind a bank of
clouds. These have the word ‘grey’ scribbled over them. Over a few
hurried lines of pencil radiating from a centre behind these clouds are
the suggestive words ‘Fire and Blood.’ On page 12, we have a stretch of
river with a distant group of trees on the left looming through the fog.
The river is strewn with fragments of ice. On the right a single boat is
visible, its tall mast and stays standing out boldly against the sky.
Above, the upper part of the sun’s face is just appearing through the
clouds. This slight, sensitive sketch is helped out for the
artist--though for the imaginative spectator it hardly needs such help,
so eloquent is it--by scribbled notes of colour; ‘Boat ... yellow,’ the
water in the foreground, ‘Greenish Black in Shadows. Ice white and
grey.’
On the next page we find two barges with brittle fragments of ice
hanging round them. On page 16, there is a barge moored beside what
seems to be a huge iceberg, with two figures on it, though it may only
be a rocky shore distorted by snow and ice into its fantastic
appearance. But the sketch on the next page looks emphatically like an
iceberg. The following sketch is here reproduced (Plate XXIV.), so the
reader may judge for himself what it is. To me it looks like floating
icebergs, the foremost one containing a wrecked vessel embedded in its
surface. This page was cut out by Mr. Ruskin and exhibited at Oxford
with the title, ‘The Inscrutable.’
Turner has summed up these experiences of his in a group of absolutely
unrivalled sea-pieces. Pictures like Mr. F. H. Fawkes’s ‘Pilot hailing a
Whitstable Hoy,’ Mr. G. J. Gould’s ‘The Nore,’ Mr. P. A. B. Widener’s
‘Meeting of the Thames and Medway,’ and Lady Wantage’s ‘Sheerness,’ seem
to me beyond all question the most glorious pictures of the sea ever
painted. The finest Dutch pictures of this kind, with all their
admirable qualities, do not seem ever to get beyond a certain prosaic
outlook. This matter-of-fact effect is enhanced by--if it is not
altogether due to
[Illustration: _PLATE XXIV_
‘THE INSCRUTABLE”
PENCIL. ABOUT 1808]
it--the ruthless display the artists make of their special knowledge of
the construction and rigging of their vessels. I believe Turner’s
knowledge of this kind was almost as exhaustive as theirs, but whether
as full or more limited, he made a better use of what he did know. His
objects are never there simply for themselves. They are always
subordinated to a genuinely imaginative conception. His pictures,
therefore, are not the work of a man with a professional speciality.
They are real epics of the sea. From their own imaginative point of view
their workmanship is almost perfect. Their style is sonorous and
weighty. They are as solemn and majestic in conception as they are manly
in feeling. They have something of that ‘beauty which, as Milton sings,
hath terror in it.’ Together ‘they move in perfect phalanx to the Dorian
mood’--the noblest sequence of poems ever dedicated to the majesty of
the sea.
When we compare such pictures as these with a subject like ‘The Death of
Nelson,’ in the National Gallery,--a subject dealing directly with a
particular historical incident--we cannot but feel that they owe
something of their loftiness and grandeur to their exaltation above all
merely limited feelings of patriotism. I suppose a Frenchman could
hardly be expected to look at the ‘Nelson’ with quite the same feelings
as an Englishman; or a Dane to regard the ‘Spithead; Boat’s crew
recovering an anchor’--which actually represents the return of the
English fleet with the Danish ships captured at Copenhagen--in the way
this event was hailed in England. The feeling of patriotism is no doubt
an admirable and useful one in real life; but in so far as art is tied
down to the service of a particular kind of patriotism, it is limited to
this definite end, and is not entirely free in and for itself. And art
which is not entirely free from all finite ends cannot rise to the full
height of its own destiny.
Yet in the very greatest art there is no opposition to all that is
essentially noble and heroic in patriotism. A masterpiece like Lady
Wantage’s ‘Sheerness,’ for example, is as full of all the essential
virtues of patriotism as a picture like the ‘Death of Nelson.’ The
difference is only in the degrees of emphasis placed on certain aspects
of the whole conception. In the ‘Sheerness’ the interest is concentrated
on the guardship at the Nore, and all that is implied in this aspect of
a nation’s discipline, hardihood, watchfulness, and self-sacrifice. And
on this idea of military (or naval) service for the Fatherland the
possibility of actual struggle and, if need be, death at the hands of
any national enemy is clearly involved. The ‘Death of Nelson,’
therefore, only makes explicit a single moment held in solution in the
other picture. Hence the question is not between the value of patriotic
feeling and a shallow, empty form of cosmopolitanism as artistic
motives, but merely under which aspect the virtues of patriotism are to
be contemplated. Which aspect does fullest justice to the whole
conception of personal devotion and sacrifice to the commonweal? My own
feeling is that the point of view which raises itself above the
particular interests of one nation, and treats the hardships and dangers
of national defence as an inevitable condition of human life, is more in
accord with the freedom and universality of the highest art. The
question, I repeat, is only one of degree, and these remarks will be
entirely misunderstood if they are taken to imply that I should have
wished that either the ‘Nelson’ or the ‘Spithead’ had not been painted.
In the ‘Spithead,’ as a matter of fact, the connection with the
particular historical incident which called it into existence has long
dropped out of sight, whilst the ‘Nelson’ has always caused a certain
feeling of dissatisfaction even among the most ardent and exclusive of
patriots. This vague feeling is possibly at the root of the adverse
technical criticisms to which it has been subjected by sailors and naval
experts. These criticisms are generally in themselves entirely
wrongheaded and sometimes fatuous, for the picture is certainly a grand
and impressive one, and by far the most adequate representation in
pictorial art of an event of the greatest national importance. But the
intuitive sense of the nation has always thought more highly of such a
picture as ‘The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth,’ than of
the ‘Death of Nelson.’ In ‘The Fighting Téméraire,’ as in the earlier
masterpieces to which I have referred, there is no touch of chauvinism
or vainglory, yet it is generously and passionately patriotic: but it is
magnanimous patriotism, which honours its foe and looks beyond and above
the present momentary noise and strife.