THE SPLENDOUR OF SUCCESS, OR ‘WHAT YOU WILL’--1813-1830
A survey of the ground we have covered--The training of Turner’s
sympathies by the poets--The limits of artistic beauty--and of a
merely ‘musical’ education--Turner unlike Wordsworth--the
predominantly sensuous bent of his genius--The parting of the
ways--The dependence of art upon society--Turner ‘the fashion’--The
influence of the Academy--The Italian visit in 1819--Turner’s
Italian sketches--Their beauty and uselessness--The Naturalistic
fallacy--Turner’s work for the engravers--The _Southern Coast_
series--‘Watchet’ and ‘Boscastle’--Whitaker’s _History of
Richmondshire_--‘Hornby Castle’ and ‘Heysham’--Scott’s _Provincial
Antiquities_--‘Edinburgh, from the Calton Hill’--‘Rochester,’ in
the _Rivers of England_ series--_England and Wales_--‘Bolton Abbey’
and ‘Colchester’--‘Stamford’--‘Tynemouth.’
We have now followed the development of Turner’s mind from boyhood to
youth and well into manhood. We have watched the architectural and
topographical draughtsman develop into an artist under the guidance of
his admiration for Wilson. Then the mind of the painter of the sublime,
of the picturesque in general, struck its unseen roots deeper into the
interests and sympathies of the people amongst whom he lived. In the
hour of national danger his heart beat high with courage and
determination. His pictures of the sea are like war songs; they strike
the Dorian note, they represent the tone of mind of a brave man who
faces wounds and death and all contingencies with unflinching endurance.
Then the mind of the laureate of a nation in arms takes a still wider
sweep. It embraces humanity and animate and inanimate nature in one
glance, and finds the soul of good in all things. The Dorian harmonies
give place to the Phrygian.
In all this Turner’s attitude seems entirely passive or receptive.
[Illustration: _PLATE XLIV_
KIRKBY LONSDALE BRIDGE
PENCIL. ABOUT 1816]
[Illustration: _PLATE XLV_
RABY CASTLE AND CO. DURHAM
PENCIL. ABOUT 1817]
His amazingly rapid growth seems to be merely an effortless assimilation
of the moral atmosphere of his time. All that was fairest and of good
repute in the common spiritual heritage of the people seems to have
passed insensibly into his thoughts and feelings. His art is a social or
national phenomenon, so impersonal (or superpersonal) that it is
difficult to point to traces of the mere individual in his work. The
individual is lost in his universal function. The man himself is nothing
but the voice or thought of what Hume has called ‘a man in general.’ Yet
his work is as far removed as any work can be from the vagueness and
coldness of the abstract universal. Behind every touch of his hand and
every thought or idea in his mind beats the pulse of a full-blooded and
passionate personality. Only, by some miracle, this man happens to be
free from the local prejudices and limitations that deflect the judgment
and sympathies of most men from the one true standard.
This education of Turner’s sympathies and feelings was the work, we have
seen reasons for concluding, of the poets and artists whom he loved and
admired. In the light and warmth of their ideal creations his own high
instincts were quickened into life and activity. Under their influence
he had entered into the common spiritual world, and they had given the
direction to his impulses and ideas regarding things human and divine.
But education must be a lifelong process, and there comes a time in the
growth of each individual when the need of something more clear-cut and
permanent than his own impulses and desires, however wholesome they may
be, declares itself. As Plato pointed out long ago, to secure the
happiest results of the best ‘musical’ education, something more than a
merely ‘musical’ education is needed. We have now reached that period in
Turner’s life when the lover of beautiful sights and thoughts and
feelings must make a determined effort to unify these manifold beauties
by an explicit principle, to exchange opinion for knowledge, if he is to
preserve the advantages he has already won. In life there is no standing
still, no resting upon our gains. We must go forward to higher
victories, or find our arms tarnish and our gains dissipate themselves.
But it may well be doubted whether art is capable of reaching a higher
point of beauty than that which Turner had already reached. Forced to
its extreme limits beauty insensibly passes into something which is at
once more and less than beauty. Such pictures as the ‘Frosty Morning,’
‘Windsor,’ and ‘The Trout Stream’ are, perhaps, the most beautiful that
art is capable of producing. And the example of Wordsworth, who did
strive upward to ‘an intelligence which has greatness and the vision of
all time and of all being,’ is not on all points reassuring. His poetry,
simply as poetry, did suffer from his philosophic studies. There may be
something in the very nature of the human soul which sets bounds to the
creation or expression of beauty.
But Turner was not like Wordsworth. He was for good and ill essentially
and solely an artist. The play of shapes and colours was probably dearer
to him than food or raiment. Having by sheer good fortune carried his
art to its highest attainable pitch of beauty before he had reached his
fortieth year, he was placed in an embarrassing position. The
dialectical movement of beauty would now carry him outside his art, into
regions where the individual man might reap rich gains, but where the
artist could reap only sorrow and disappointment. The artist in Turner
was stronger than the man. He loved the sensuous medium of art more than
the spiritual beauty into which the current of traditional wisdom had
carried him. The remainder of his life is therefore dedicated to the
passionate and audacious development of the material beauties of his
art.
We have now to trace in his works the gradual encroachments of the
purely sensuous side of his art. For a time all seems well, perhaps more
than well, for the gain in all the lower elements of his art is very
striking. During the next twenty years his works gain constantly in the
sensuous attractiveness of colour and in the formal beauties of rhythm
and design. The loss of beauty is compensated by deep draughts of
pleasantness. Yet amid the feverish intoxication of sensuous beauty a
wild unrest and despair make themselves increasingly felt. The man has
sacrificed himself to his art, and the starved human soul turns in
bitterness from the ardently desired rewards of the most brilliantly
triumphant artistic career that modern times have witnessed.
It is usual in treating mainly of Turner’s oil paintings to fix upon the
year 1815 as the great turning-point in his career. After
[Illustration: _PLATE XLVI_
RABY CASTLE
PENCIL. ABOUT 1807]
[Illustration: _PLATE XLVII_
RABY CASTLE
PENCIL. ABOUT 1817]
1815 there is a marked change in the aims and character of Turner’s art,
and it is convenient to date this change from the year that saw the end
of the Napoleonic wars, and inaugurated a new era in the social and
political condition of this country. From this date, too, the conditions
of artistic production changed. The rapid development of industrial
concerns brought a new class of patrons upon the scene. Before 1815,
Turner’s patrons had been mainly the landed aristocracy; after 1815, his
chief patrons were the successful merchants of the great towns. From
that time the men of commerce and the manufacturers ousted the
aristocracy from the leading position which they had held in the
councils of the country. With the change of men a change took place in
the ideals, manners and taste of the country; and Turner, with his
extraordinary sensibility, his ready powers of intuition and rapid
assimilation, seemed bound to reflect the change in his work.
Yet if we look closer into Turner’s career, we find that 1815 was rather
the year that saw the brilliant public inauguration of the new era, than
the actual beginning of the change. The ‘Crossing the Brook,’ exhibited
in 1815, is often regarded as the impressive close of Turner’s early
manner, yet this beautiful picture already bears the impress of that
_folie des grandeurs_ to which we owe most of the excesses of the new
manner. The ‘Frosty Morning’ of 1813 is really the last work in which
the inspiration rings true throughout, in which the form and content are
absolutely indissoluble. ‘Dido and Æneas,’ the only picture exhibited in
1814, is a frigid pseudo-classical pomposity, the due development of the
strain of baser metal in Turner’s genius, which had already betrayed
itself in the ‘Macon’ of 1803, the ‘Narcissus and Echo’ of 1804, and the
‘Schaffhausen’ of 1806. In glancing rapidly over Turner’s career we have
been able to ignore these works; in the rush and splendour of his
general development such pictures fall into insignificance, as casual
indications that a busy professional man’s industry may outrun his
inspiration.
After 1813 it is impossible to ignore this side of Turner’s production.
It was just this regrettable side of his work that appealed most
strongly to the middle-class public for whom he had now to cater. ‘Dido
Building Carthage’ (1815) is a picture exactly to the taste of the
admirers of the first instalment of _Childe Harold_, _The Bride of
Abydos_, _The Corsair_, and _Lara_. It has the historical remoteness,
the vague and empty grandeur, the mysterious dreaminess, the warm,
voluptuous atmosphere and intoxicating lyrical movement of the
contemporary phase of Romantic poetry. In ‘The Decline of the
Carthaginian Empire’ (1817), ‘The Field of Waterloo’ (1818), ‘Richmond
Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday’ (1819) and ‘Rome from the
Vatican’ (1820), we recognise the contemporary and fellow-worker of
Byron, Moore, Southey, Chateaubriand and Lamartine. In 1822 Turner’s
only picture at the Royal Academy was entitled ‘What you Will’!--an
ominous but significant title. It seems to put into words the ruling
motive of this new phase of his art; to show that Turner is fully
conscious that he is trimming his barque to catch the breath of popular
applause. ‘The Bay of Baiae’ (1823), the two ‘Mortlakes’ (1826-27),
‘Dido directing the Equipment of the Fleet’ (1828) and ‘Ulysses’ (1829)
indicate clearly the predominant bent of the artist’s mind towards the
grosser pleasures of his art.
These works brought and kept Turner prominently before the public eye.
They made him the pride and glory of the Royal Academy, and put him on a
level of celebrity with Sir Thomas Lawrence. They made him, in short, in
Sir Walter Scott’s words, ‘the fashion,’ yet it is these works that
Turner’s admirers of the present day regard with only moderate
enthusiasm.
Compared with the work of the previous decade, such pictures cannot but
strike us as unworthy of the artist’s genius. Yet we have a tendency
nowadays, I think, to overrate the independence of the artist. The
modern artist, in so far as he is dependent upon the support of the
society in which he works, is not an entirely free agent. The society
that applauded them and for whose pleasure they were produced must
therefore accept perhaps the main responsibility for the middle-class
ideals stamped upon these pictures. In tracing the reaction of society
upon art and art upon society, it is an extremely difficult matter to
decide which factor is the more powerful, but I am inclined to think it
is not art. But however this may be, it is certainly the duty of the
individual to fortify himself as best he can against the contagion to
which he is exposed. And it must be confessed that Turner was but
ill-provided within himself with the means to resist the deadening
influences of the atmosphere of bad taste into which he was now
launched. It is true that Turner was not exactly what is called a
‘society-man,’ and he might therefore have more easily escaped the
contagion of those drawing-room ideals to which men like Tom Moore
succumbed. But Turner was a member of the Royal Academy. It was the
recognised organisation of his profession, and he valued highly the
honours it had to confer. His lack of general education made him an easy
victim to the pretensions of officialism; like all uneducated people, he
had a ridiculous reverence for the trappings and mummery of the learned
world, for degrees, diplomas, titles. He was inordinately proud of the
right to write ‘R.A.,’ ‘P.P.,’ after his name, and to alter these
letters to _P._R.A. was the height of his ambition. Under these
circumstances he could not but identify himself with the immediate
practical aims of the Royal Academy. Now this ill-starred institution is
so unwisely and so unfortunately constituted, that its very existence,
and all its powers of activity as a professional benevolent society, are
made to depend almost entirely upon its popularity as an exhibition
society. The Academy throve then as it thrives now, in proportion as it
succeeds in catering for the taste of the fashionable and moneyed
public; it could only lose ground if it made the slightest attempts to
guide or educate the public sense of beauty. In this way it had become
in Turner’s time nothing more nor less than an organisation for stamping
the ideals of the drawing-room upon English art.
In 1819 Turner made his first visit to Italy, the material for the
pseudo-classical pictures painted before this having been derived from
other artists’ pictures and engravings. It is curious that he should
have waited till his forty-fifth year before making this journey. The
Continent, it is true, had to a great extent been closed to English
travellers since the outbreak of the French Revolution; but in spite of
political and other difficulties Turner had managed to see a good deal
of France, Belgium, Savoy and Switzerland, and he had been down the
Rhine. If he had been equally keen to see Italy he could certainly have
gone there also, especially as Italy was more generally accessible to an
Englishman than any of the other countries he had visited. This curious
shrinking from Italy may very likely have been due to the promptings of
his own nature. When we examine his art as a whole we clearly see that
he found more delight in the wildness, irregularity and caprice of
Switzerland and the Rhine valleys than in the more regular scenery of
Italy. Even Mr. Ruskin admits that Turner got no good from Italian
scenery; Naples, Rome and Florence only put him out and bewildered him;
Venice is the only Italian city that lent itself at all gracefully to
his genius, and Venice is the most northern in character of all the
Italian cities.
But the requirements of his patrons and the peculiar Academic
misunderstanding of the principles of landscape art conspired to send
Turner to Italy. There the scenery is more beautiful in itself and
richer in historical associations than elsewhere in Europe, therefore it
is the duty of the ambitious landscape painter who happens to have had
the misfortune to be born somewhere out of Italy to stop painting the
mere scenes of his own country as soon as possible, and to set out at
once for such spots as Tivoli, Narni and Lago Maggiore, the spots
approved, stamped and consecrated by generations of the prosperous
travellers of all the chief countries of Europe. The theoretical error
at the root of this dangerous prejudice is the confusion of the
materially pretty, agreeable, and pleasant, with artistic beauty, which
is something essentially different from any of these things. But this
confusion of the pleasant and the beautiful was a doctrine which the
Academy of Turner’s time was bent on inculcating by its teaching and
exemplifying in its practice.
It happened that Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of the most brilliant
exponents of the gospel of the pretty and pleasant, was spending the
summer of 1819 in Rome. In the intervals of his labours and relaxations
with the great and beautiful of society, he found time to notice the
grandeur and beauties of the scenery around him. During this time ‘his
letters to England were full of entreaties addressed to their common
friends to urge upon Turner the importance of visiting Rome while “his
genius was in the flower.” “It is injustice to his fame and his
country,” he writes on another occasion, “to let the finest period of
his genius pass away ... without visiting these scenes.”’[21] Whether
these
[Illustration: _PLATE XLVIII_
LOOKING UP THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE, FROM NEAR THE ACCADEMIA DI BELLE
ARTI
PENCIL. 1819]
[Illustration: _PLATE XLIX_
ST. MARK’S, VENICE, WITH PART OF THE DUCAL PALACE
PENCIL. 1819]
appeals had any special weight with Turner we do not know, but he set
out for Italy within a month or two of the writing of these letters.
He went from Calais to Paris, followed the usual coach-route to Turin,
explored the Lakes of Como, Lugano and Maggiore, and reached Venice by
way of Milan, Brescia and Desenzano. He must have spent some time at
Venice to judge from the number of drawings made there, then went to
Bologna, Cesena and Rimini, and continued along the coast of the
Adriatic to Ancona. At Ancona he turned inland to Loreto and, following
the high post road through Recanati and Macerata, entered the Via
Flaminia at Foligno, and passing through Narni and Orticoli entered Rome
by the Porta del Popolo, probably sometime in October. From Rome he
explored Frascati, Tivoli and Albano, and made a tour to Naples, Baiae,
Pozzuoli, Pompeii, Amalfi, Sorrento and Herculaneum. He was back in Rome
by the 2nd December, then visited Florence, and, recrossing the Alps on
the 24th January 1820, returned through Piedmont and France. On the 12th
February we find him dining at Grosvenor Place, London, with his friends
the Fawkeses.
To judge from the number of sketch-books filled on this journey Turner
must have had the pencil in his hands practically the whole time he was
away. Before starting he had ‘got up’ the subject carefully from books
and engravings, and he knew exactly what buildings, antiquities and
views he ought to look for at each place he went to. In this way he lost
no time mooning about, like a modern artist, looking for unexpected
beauties. He just went straight from one guide-book point of interest to
another, sketched each methodically from every possible point of view
and hurried on to the next. The sketch-books he used were generally
about 7½ by 4½ inches in size, composed of ordinary white paper. His
favourite medium was a hard-pointed pencil. His sketches are always made
with a view to information, never for effect. In this way about a dozen
books were filled, each of about a hundred pages, and most are drawn on
on both sides of the pages. Our reproductions of the sketches of the
Grand Canal, the Piazzetta at Venice, and Trajan’s Column (Plates
XLVIII., L., and LIII.) may stand as examples of the main body of work
done by Turner during this visit.
In addition to these small sketch-books he also used some of larger
size, with the paper prepared with a wash of grey. He used one of these
books at Tivoli, and another at Rome and Naples. The grey tint was of
such a nature that it lifted quite easily when rubbed with bread or
india-rubber. In this way he was able to indicate the chiaroscuro of his
sketches with ease and celerity. The more elaborate drawings of Rome
were made in this way, among them those exquisite views from Monte
Mario, which have long been among the most admired of the drawings
exhibited in the Turner Water-Colour Rooms at the National Gallery.
Where the subject was an interesting one he occasionally worked over it,
or over parts of it, with water-colour, as in the ‘View of Rome from
Monte Mario’ (No. 592) here reproduced (Plate LI.), and ‘The Colosseum’
(No. 596) among the exhibited drawings. But the number of drawings in
which Turner had recourse to colour is extremely limited, quite
nineteen-twentieths of them being simply in pencil.
The drawings made during this visit are, in Mr. Ruskin’s opinion, the
best Turner ever made from nature. ‘All the artist’s powers,’ he wrote,
‘were at this period in perfection; none of his faults had developed
themselves; and his energies were taxed to the utmost to seize, both in
immediate admiration, and for future service, the loveliest features of
some of the most historically interesting scenery in the world.’[22] And
again, ‘They are, in all respects, the most true and the most beautiful
ever made by the painter.’[23] And assuredly it would be difficult to
praise these superb drawings too highly or too enthusiastically; for
sheer grace of pencilling, for skilful composition, for loving,
unwearied rendering of architecture and natural scenery they are
absolutely unrivalled.
But it is only as drawings, as works that contain their end within
themselves, that they can be praised so highly. They are probably the
most beautiful topographical drawings that have ever been made, but
Turner did not regard himself as a topographical draughtsman, and from
his point of view the results of this journey cannot have been
completely satisfactory. If he had valued himself at all on his capacity
for making beautiful topographical
[Illustration: _PLATE L_
THE PIAZZETTA, VENICE, LOOKING TOWARDS ISOLA DI S. GIORGIO MAGGIORE
PENCIL. 1819]
[Illustration: _PLATE LI_
ROME, FROM MONTE MARIO
PENCIL AND WATER COLOUR. 1819]
drawings, he would surely have taken some steps to bring these
achievements to the notice of the public.[24] He did nothing of the
kind. We have seen that it was his settled habit to regard his sketches
and drawings from nature as merely the preliminary stages of his
pictures. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, Turner, after his few years of
apprenticeship, never drew from nature without altering and arranging
what he saw. He never accepted the given momentary facts in a passive
spirit. It is on record that once he said to the companion of one of his
sketching tours who had got into a muddle with the drawing he was
making, ‘What are you in search of?’ And this active spirit had been one
of the chief characteristics of all the drawing from nature he had done
before his visit to Italy: he had always been in search of something, he
had always had a very clear and exact idea of what he wanted, and he had
almost invariably managed to grasp just what he wanted, while
encumbering himself with very little else.
This clearness of intention is absent from the Italian drawings. The
scenery, the buildings, the people, the shipping and the effects of
light are all new to him, and delightfully interesting. The novelty of
his surroundings carries him out of himself. He becomes for a time a
mere common tourist with a kind of accidental knack of making rapid and
wonderfully beautiful pictorial memoranda. It is as though the creative
artist had said to his familiar daemon, ‘We are now in fair Italy. Sleep
thou, and take a well-earned rest. The business of note-taking will go
on automatically without thee; and when we are once more back in dreary
London thou shalt awake as a giant refreshed with slumber, and shalt
knead with renewed vigour the material that has been accumulated.’ But
the results achieved were not as satisfactory as Turner might have
expected. The best that could be made of these wonderful sketches was
two or three charming water-colours for Mr. Fawkes, a weak and empty
‘Forum Romanum’ for Mr. Soane’s Museum, and a large ‘Bay of Baiae,’
which, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, ‘is encumbered with material; it
contains ten times as much as is necessary to a good picture, and yet is
so crude in colour as to look unfinished.’[25]
It therefore depends very much upon what _we_ are in search of, what
conclusions we shall come to about these Italian drawings. If we are
evangelists with a mission to preach the Gospel of Naturalism, we may
accept them as the finest works of art Turner ever produced, in spite of
the fact that he found them useless and worse than useless for his
artistic purposes. From such a point of view it would be Turner’s fault
if these beautiful things threw him out and led him astray; or, as Mr.
Ruskin puts it, ‘the effect of Italy upon his [Turner’s] mind is very
puzzling ... he seems never to have entered thoroughly into the spirit
of Italy, and the materials he obtained there were afterwards but
awkwardly introduced into his large compositions.’[26]
But if the processes of artistic creation are worth studying, we shall
go on to ask ourselves how it is that the most elaborate, painstaking
and thoroughly delightful drawings Turner ever made from nature were
actually the least useful to him as a maker of pictures; and how it is
that exquisitely deliberate and dainty drawings like those in the Roman
and Neapolitan sketch-books lead actually to the production of frigid,
hybrid, pseudo-classical pictures, while hurried and scarcely
intelligible scribbles like those reproduced in Plates XXVII. and XXV.
had been the means of bringing into existence such noble and impressive
pictures as the ‘Windmill and Lock,’ and designs like the ‘Hedging and
Ditching’?
The answer to these questions is not far to seek. The state of mind
necessary for the production of the two kinds of drawings is essentially
different, and the one, which produces the exhaustive and accurate
drawing, is antagonistic to the state of mind in which a strongly
imaginative work of art is conceived, while the other, which produces a
less immediately satisfying record, is actually the state of mind in
which a passionately felt work of art comes to birth. In the drawing
which we admire so much the emotional element is in abeyance, the
cognitive or sense-perceptive is predominant; in the other the emotional
element is predominant. But in the first case, while the immediate
result, considered simply in itself, is more delightful, there has been
[Illustration: _PLATE LII_
ROME, FROM THE VATICAN
PEN AND INK AND CHINESE WHITE ON GREY. 1819]
[Illustration: _PLATE LIII_
TRAJAN’S COLUMN, IN THE FORUM OF TRAJAN
PENCIL. 1819]
no real quickening of the artist’s spirit; in the second case, while the
immediate result is deplorable for us, it is eloquent and glorious for
the artist himself as the first stirring of his newborn spiritual
progeny.
The object of these remarks is not to attempt to convince us that these
charming Italian drawings are at all less charming than they seem; it is
rather to combat the false deductions which Naturalism has succeeded in
drawing from the fact that they are so genuinely delightful and so
self-satisfying. It is inevitable that an artist shall constantly be
making studies from nature, sharpening and exercising his powers of
observation, and storing his note-books and memory with facts of natural
appearances. But it does not follow that this business of observing and
recording visual facts is the essential or even most important part of
the artist’s function. Naturalism assumes that it is. It therefore
treats the power to copy natural objects faithfully and without
alteration as the exact equivalent of the power of pictorial
expression.[27] And so far as the system of art education pursued in
this country has any rational foundation, it is based upon this doctrine
of Naturalism. Hence the only kind of training that is provided for
English art students is training in this capacity of reproducing objects
of sight accurately. This has come to be the beginning and the end of
modern art education, with what results we have only to walk into any
summer exhibition of the Royal Academy to see. Under these
circumstances, I think it is important that we should give its due
weight to any evidence that tends to invalidate these generally received
opinions. Of course the evidence of the practice and line of development
of one artist, even an artist as great as Turner, is not by itself
sufficient to settle such a question; but still, I submit, this evidence
has a distinct bearing on the subject and should receive its due
attention.
If the doctrine of Naturalism possessed the universal validity it is
assumed to possess, the pictures based upon the truest and most
elaborate drawings Turner ever made from nature--and that too of the
most beautiful and the most historically interesting scenery in the
world--should have been the best he had so far produced. They are
admittedly among the worst. If the training acquired by making such
drawings is essential to the development of the artist’s powers of
pictorial expression, how comes it that in Turner’s case this training
came after the production of his most perfect pictures,--these Italian
drawings being made in 1819, the ‘Sheerness,’ ‘Windsor,’ ‘Abingdon,’ and
‘Frosty Morning’ having been painted between 1809 and 1813, and he had
never worked from nature like this before? This is the evidence. I can
only beg the candid reader to give it the earnest consideration it seems
to me to deserve.
Turner’s oil paintings produced between 1815 and 1830 cannot but strike
us as disappointing, especially when we compare them with the output of
the years immediately preceding this period. It is only as a sea-painter
that Turner reminds us of his former mastery, and with the exception of
the ‘Dort’ (1818) ‘Entrance of the Meuse’ (1819), the Greenwich ‘Battle
of Trafalgar’ (1823) and ‘Now for the Painter’ (1827), it would do
Turner’s reputation little harm if all his oil pictures produced during
these years were destroyed. His real greatness is only shown in this
period by the water-colours produced mainly for the engravers. In the
work done for the _Southern Coast_, Scott’s _Provincial Antiquities_,
the _Rivers_ and _Ports of England_, and the _England and Wales_ series,
Turner displayed all the genuine nobleness and sweetness of his nature.
I propose therefore to occupy the remainder of this chapter with a rapid
survey of these undertakings, singling out from each one or two
representative designs for closer examination.
We have now seen what was the character of Turner’s pictures which
gained him most applause and favour in Academic circles and with the
public of the Academy. It is no doubt regrettable that a man of his
talents should have to waste his time--as it seems to us--in the
manufacture of puerile and pretentious specimens of Academic ‘high art,’
but we can easily make too much of the matter. There is something
altogether incommensurable about such a man; he is like some great
natural force, copious, abundant and unwearying. He must have drawn and
painted with as little effort as ordinary mortals exert when they play
cards or write letters to their friends. I have no doubt that
[Illustration: _PLATE LIV_
STUDY OF PLANTS, WEEDS, ETC.
PENCIL. ABOUT 1823]
the ‘high art’ concoctions bothered him much more than his better works,
for it was all ratiocinative, conscious, all spun out of the
understanding without any deep-struck roots in the unconscious life of
his affections. But no doubt he felt prouder of the results, simply
because he was more conscious of the efforts. We have no grounds for
supposing that he did not enjoy the work, and in return it certainly
gave him comparative independence, and encouraged him to produce.
Printsellers and publishers were anxious to get the celebrated
Academician to work for them, and the big middle-class public were eager
to possess themselves of engravings from the great man’s designs. It was
certainly a clear gain that the designer of the _Southern Coast_, the
_Richmondshire_ drawings, Scott’s _Provincial Antiquities_, the _Rivers_
and _Ports of England_, and the _England and Wales_ series could afford
to keep publishers and editors at arm’s length, that he was so strong in
public favour that his work was influenced by none but artistic
considerations.
It hardly comes within the scope of the present essay to study the
drawings in detail which form the originals of Turner’s engraved work,
important as these drawings are as examples of the artist’s genius. Each
drawing is a perfect work of art in itself, the fact that an engraving
was to be made from it counting practically as nothing with the artist.
If the subject did not lend itself quite satisfactorily to the
engraver’s requirements, Turner introduced various modifications into
the engraver’s proofs, but he did not alter the drawings. In this way
the original drawings were kept as independent creations. Into them the
artist was free to pour all that spontaneous native side of his talent
which could find no outlet in his ambitious ‘high art’ productions. As
water-colours the originals of the engravings that were issued between
1814 and 1830 are among the most remarkable and consummate achievements
of the medium. With hardly an exception they are worked entirely in
transparent colour, and for sheer range of invention, variety of effect,
and loveliness of colour they have no equals. But their place is among
the artist’s completed works, and as our immediate business is with the
sketches and studies, we can only touch upon these exquisitely beautiful
water-colours incidentally; _i.e._ only in so far as they help us to
grasp the significance of the sketches and preliminary drawings which
went to their production.
It is a curious sign how little conscious Turner was of the nature and
limitations of his own capacities, that the plan of the _Southern Coast_
series of engravings, as it first took form in his mind, included a long
narrative poem from his own hand describing the history and local
peculiarities of the places he proposed to illustrate. It is hardly
probable that an individual with less capacity for verbal expression
ever sat down to write a long poem. Yet it is easy to see how it was
that Turner came to think himself competent to undertake such a task.
The stamp of his mind was genuinely poetic. He had, and knew that he
had, in a high measure ‘the vision and the faculty divine.’ The
inspiration of his best works had been drawn from the poets, from
Thomson, Akenside, and Milton. His pictures, so far as it is possible to
distinguish content from form, are real poems. And the technical
accomplishment of pictorial art had come to him so easily and naturally
that it may well have seemed to flow inevitably from the innate strength
of his emotions and the vivid hue of his imagination. He probably
thought that he had only to take a pen in his hand to find the
accomplishment of verse following with the same ease and inevitability.
The verses Turner did succeed in writing are pathetic failures; the mind
so intimately versed in the subtleties of visible melody and harmony was
dead to the witchery of verbal sound. It is true that his failure is not
quite so abject as the extracts Thornbury has printed from the attempted
_Southern Coast_ epic would lead one to expect, but, when all due
allowance is made for Thornbury’s blunders of transcription, the result
is still quite hopeless. But it is otherwise when we turn to the designs
made from the same subject-matter, and, in spite of Lessing and a host
of modern theorists, I must insist that in their heart and essence they
are indeed poems.
The first number of the _Southern Coast_ was published in January 1814,
and the last number was not issued till May 1826, but with only one or
two exceptions the whole of the Dorsetshire, Devon, Cornwall and
Somersetshire subjects (and these form about three-quarters of the whole
work) were made from sketches taken during a single journey in the
summer of 1811. These sketches are the kind of notes that a poet would
take; from the point of view of the historian or topographer they are
singularly incomplete. Occasionally we come across a tolerably elaborate
drawing of a ruined castle or stretch of rocky coast, but even these are
summary and hurried in comparison with the Italian drawings, and Turner
seldom chose such sketches as the bases of his finished pictures. He
certainly found them useful as the means of making a methodical analysis
of the pictorial constituents of what he saw, and as storing his memory
and giving matter and fulness to his own conceptions of natural
phenomena. But there their usefulness ended. The actual embryo of the
pictures he painted is generally a hurried scrawl about two square
inches in size, made with a blunt pencil.
Among the _Southern Coast_ sketch-books is a fat little volume bound in
brown calf, having a brass clasp and lettered on the back, _British
Itenary (sic)_. The title page runs as follows:--_The British Itinerary_
| or | Travellers Pocket Companion | throughout | Great Britain |
Exhibiting | the Direct Route to Every | Borough and Commercial Town |
in the Kingdom | with the principal Cross Roads | Compiled from Actual
Measurement | and the best Surveys and Authorities | By | Nathanl.
Coltman; | Surveyor. | Employed by the Post Office in Measuring the
Roads of | Great Britain | London. | Printed and Published, by Wm.
Dickie, No. 120 Strand; and N. Coltman, Green Walk; Black Friars Road. |
Price 3s. Sewed.’ It contains two hundred and fifty leaves, the printed
matter only occupying about a third of the total number, the remainder
having been left blank for notes. These are now filled with Turner’s
notes of expenses incurred, the draft of the poem he attempted to write,
and a number of minute sketches. Among these it is possible to recognise
the originals of several of the _Southern Coast_ designs, including
those of Combe Martin, Watchet, Boscastle and Clovelly, the ‘Dartmouth’
and ‘Dartmouth Castle’ of the _Rivers of England_ series, and the sketch
upon which the superb ‘Stonehenge at Daybreak’ (R. 81), in the
unpublished ‘Liber,’ was probably founded. Two of these sketches have
been reproduced on Plates LV. and LVI., together with the engravings of
the completed designs. That the finished drawings could have been made
from such slender material can hardly appear less than astonishing to
those familiar with the methods of artists of the present day; but to
the best of my belief, Turner had no other sketches or drawings of these
places to assist him in his work, and it can only add to our amazement
when we notice that in all probability the finished drawings were made,
one nearly eight years, and the other nearly fourteen years, after the
sketches were taken; the ‘Watchet’ plate having been published in April
1820, and the ‘Boscastle’ in March 1825.
When we examine carefully the sketch of Watchet we find that it gives us
very little more than the general idea of a small fishing village, with
a curved breakwater and a stretch of rocky coast running off into the
distance. This general idea must have been all that the artist retained
of his experiences of the place, _i.e._, he cannot possibly have
retained any bare unattached visual sensations of any of the particular
objects comprised in the scene. The details of the construction of the
breakwater in the engraving may, for all I know (I have never visited
the place), be exactly like those of the actual one which Turner saw
there, but what little I know of his ordinary methods of work inclines
me to doubt it. It is probably true enough to the general facts of the
case, but all those little local accidents of form which the
conscientious realist of to-day would linger over so lovingly are
certainly ignored. No doubt when Turner was on the spot he looked at the
breakwater, as at everything, with keen and vigilant eyes, and his
impression of the structure would have contributed to the building up in
his mind of a definite and concrete idea of the laws and customs of
breakwaters in general. And when he set to work to elaborate his sketch
it was doubtless this general idea which came into play, and which
turned those half-dozen rudely scratched lines in the sketch into a
sharply defined mental picture, as vivid to Turner’s imagination as a
real scene, and infinitely more useful for his immediate purpose, for
the task of selection and rejection was already done. In this way the
whole subject came to life; the sketch, a fixed point in present
perception, beckoning forth the stored essential riches of the artist’s
mind. Those three upright lines inside the breakwater turn into
[Illustration: _PLATE LV_
WATCHET, SOMERSETSHIRE
PENCIL. ABOUT 1811]
[Illustration: WATCHET, SOMERSETSHIRE
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “THE SOUTHERN COAST,” 1 APRIL, 1820]
[Illustration: _PLATE LVI_
BOSCASTLE, CORNWALL
PENCIL, ABOUT 1811]
[Illustration: BOSCASTLE, CORNWALL
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “THE SOUTHERN COAST,” 10 MARCH, 1824]
an array of fishing boats, the sea ripples into the harbour and creeps
up the shore, the village straightens itself out and grows into a
collection of habitable houses, with gardens and parting walls, the
women come out of the houses to spread their washing on the grass to
dry, others gossip in the roadway, the men have a little business
loading or unloading one of the boats, or else see to the nets, or
stroll idly along the jetty, and a couple set off on important business
along the road that leads over the hill and far away. The whole process,
of course, is absurdly easy and familiar. Even the least imaginative of
us is capable of some kind of success in this line of imaginative
interpretation. The only point of difference between the least of us and
the greatest in this kind of exercise is in the quality of the
subjective filling-out with which we clothe our meagre data, in the
wealth of experience stored and refined by thought, its coherence, and
above all, its clear-cut precision and definition. The power to force
all the floating imagery thus called up to what I think Blake called
‘the seeing point’--to make the mental imagery as clear-cut and vivid as
an actual object of sight, and then to use it as the material for the
construction of a picture, these are exceptional capacities; but we can
hardly doubt that the psychological processes which connect sketch and
imaginative amplification, even in the mind of the most gifted artist,
are the same as those which connect sign and interpretation in the minds
of all normally constituted individuals.
To an artist trained in modern methods of literal transcription, it is
curious to notice the liberties Turner allows himself to take with his
own sketch. In it the main shapes of the mass of rock in the middle
distance are pretty clearly marked, but instead of carefully retaining
these and amplifying them, his busy mind sets to work and builds the
whole structure up afresh. In the end it comes out very different from
the sketch, but it is so well and truly put together, it is so
thoroughly steeped in the profound knowledge garnered in years of the
sharpest observation and study, that we accept it more gladly than an
unintelligent transcript of any particular rock formation. Nay more,
even if we had forced Turner himself to stay there on the spot, and
elaborate his representation with the scene in front of his eyes, there
would have been no gain to the drawing, for the result could not
possibly have been more thoroughly penetrated with the laws of human
thought and observation.
We notice the same freedom in dealing with the ‘Boscastle’ sketch. The
general character only of the rocks on the right is there indicated, but
in the engraving the whole mass is recreated from the stores of the
artist’s knowledge. In the sketch, too, there is no authority for the
solid masonry on the rock to the left, immediately below the gang of men
assisting the vessel into harbour. Note also the alteration in the
profile of this rock, which slopes less abruptly in the sketch than in
the engraving.
It is true that these two plates can hardly be ranked as among the
finest of the _Southern Coast_ subjects; the ‘Watchet’ is, I think,
rather a poor design, and though the ‘Boscastle’ is finer, it can hardly
be classed with such consummate achievements as the ‘Plymouth Dock, from
Mount Edgecumbe,’ ‘Poole,’ or ‘The Land’s End.’ In these designs the
subjective synthesis has a more distinctly emotional setting, but there
can be no doubt that the processes of imaginative construction are on
exactly the same lines as those we have just indicated. In every case
the active motive force is something within the artist’s own soul; it is
not given from without.
The next important publication with which Turner was connected after the
commencement of the _Southern Coast_, was Whitaker’s _History of
Richmondshire_, to which he furnished a series of twenty illustrations.
This set of drawings, often spoken of as ‘the Yorkshire series,’ has
always been regarded with peculiar affection by all lovers of Turner’s
water-colour work. The originals are nearly all in private collections
(where I hope they will be carefully guarded from the light, as the
blues in them are of a fugitive nature), but there are two permanently
accessible to the public in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge--thanks to
Mr. Ruskin’s generosity--and a third is in London, in the Victoria and
Albert Museum. The Cambridge drawings, the ‘Richmond, Yorks,’ and the
‘Mossdale Fall,’ are already somewhat faded, especially the latter one,
but the London drawing, of ‘Hornby Castle,’ thanks to Mr. Vaughan’s
wise
[Illustration: _PLATE LVII_
HORNBY CASTLE, FROM TATHAM CHURCH
PENCIL. ABOUT 1816]
[Illustration: _PLATE LVIII_
HORNBY CASTLE, FROM TATHAM CHURCH
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN WHITAKER’S “RICHMONDSHIRE,” JUNE, 1822]
stipulation that it shall always be protected by a curtain when not
being looked at, is still in fairly good condition. The engravings from
the whole series were published between the years 1819 and 1823, but the
sketches on which the drawings were based were all made during a tour in
the summer of 1816.
So far as I know, Turner did not make a single colour sketch from nature
during the whole of this tour. All the sketches are in pencil and the
water-colours were all painted in the studio entirely from these pencil
memoranda. The sketches are very similar to those made for the _Southern
Coast_ subjects, but they contain evidence that the artist was in a
softer and gentler frame of mind. The conquering Napoleonic insolence
has passed into an attitude of human and affectionate solicitude. The
touch of the pencil point is everywhere light and graceful, yet it is as
swift as ever, never lingering for a moment over details or particular
facts. This is especially noticeable in the treatment of foliage; the
pencil seeming always to caress the general idea of foliage, while
holding the particular shapes and even positions of trees and bushes as
of only slight importance. The work, one cannot but feel, is that of a
happy and contented man, at peace with himself and pleased with his
surroundings. When we remember the close proximity of Farnley Hall to
these scenes, and that Mr. and Mrs. Fawkes and their family actually
accompanied the artist over part of the ground, we can hardly be
surprised at the sunniness of temper evinced by these sketches.
In nearly all the designs human figures and cattle play a prominent
part. This is noticeably the case with the two subjects I have chosen
for illustration. In the ‘Hornby Castle’ the incident of the broken jug,
the weeping maiden, the sympathetic bystanders, the picturesque
passer-by on his donkey, the busy milk-maid, and above all the cat,
triumphantly lapping up the spilt milk, all this is at least as
important an element in the picture as the Castle and view itself. In
the ‘Heysham’ the reapers, cattle, milkmaid, and passing waggon seem to
form the keynote of the whole design. Yet there are no sketches or even
the slightest indications of any of these things in the sketch-books.
They were evolved, I firmly believe, entirely by the artists’ creative
imagination as each scene came to life under his hands in the studio. To
some extent, no doubt, the decorative or mechanical requirements of the
subject solicited their existence. In the ‘Heysham,’ for example, lines
are wanted in the foreground to repeat with variations the horizontal
undulations of the mountains in the distance and middle-distance; the
cast shadows do this, and hence we have the presence of the cows and
figures as pretexts for these shadows. And then we may as well make
these objects useful in themselves; hence the turn of the foreground
cow’s neck placed just where it seems to complete the curve of the
descending hills, and the sharp silhouette of the head catches the eye
while the cast shadow swings it away in a new and happy direction.
Exactly why the eye should find such exquisite enjoyment in the plunge
down from the hill’s profile to the head of the calf, rubbing her nose
against the back of the seated white cow, and then on to the foreground
beast, and then in springing off again at a sharp angle to the bottom of
the large foreground stone in the corner just above the
signature,--exactly why we take pleasure in this kind of visual melody,
I do not know, but I know that the tracks laid for visible flights of
this kind, crossing each other and interweaving in all directions, form
a very large part of the enjoyment which Turner’s drawings provide.
The pencil sketch of Heysham (Plate LIX. (_a_)) thus formed, as it were,
the leading motive of the water-colour drawing, or rather it provided a
series of shapes which could not be varied beyond certain limits, and
these shapes formed the starting-point of the elaborate visual movement
which Turner proceeded to invent and weave round it. I called just now
this side of the work ‘decorative or mechanical,’ because I wished to
distinguish it from a different but related aspect. This unmeaning and
abstract play of lines is like the rhyme, assonance and rhythm of a
poem; a part, but an unconscious, and as it were dependent, part, of the
whole effect. No sane person would read a poem expressly for the jingle
of the sounds, unless for the purposes of analysis, and in the same way,
no sane lover of pictures would look at this drawing of Heysham merely
for the visible play of the lines and masses. Neither can the artist or
poet abandon themselves to the
[Illustration: _PLATE LIX_
HEYSHAM, WITH BLACK COMBE, CONISTON OLD MAN, HELVELLYN, ETC., IN
DISTANCE
PENCIL. ABOUT 1816]
[Illustration: HEYSHAM AND CUMBERLAND MOUNTAINS
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN WHITAKER’S “RICHMONDSHIRE,” 22 AUGUST, 1822]
mere unmeaning play of sounds or lines in the process of composition.
These external requirements must be subordinated to the requirements of
the meaning. And so, though I said just now that these mechanical
requirements may have had some share in calling the figures and
incidents represented into being, we must be careful not to forget that
that share is only of slight and subordinate importance. What is
important is the essential congruity of the figures and incidents with
the landscape itself; they must appear not as something arbitrarily
added, but as a mere development or further determination of the meaning
already implicit in the landscape. In the present case so intimate is
what I may call the logical identity between the bare view, as
represented by the initial sketch, and as a topographical fact, and the
whole living and moving scene as represented by the finished design,
that the development of the one from the other seems as inevitable as
the march of the seasons or the processes of growth and decay to which
we ourselves are subject.
From this point of view I think it is easy to see that such a result is
attainable in no other way than that which Turner has followed. No
actual scene could ever possess quite the same close-knit logical
coherence, the same absolute absence of irrelevance, as we find in
Turner’s finished drawing; so that the most faithful and loving and
skilful reproduction of the most carefully selected aspect of actuality
would never give us the same kind of outer and inner unity that Turner
has achieved by his method of amplifying, modifying, and interpreting
his slight pencil sketches. Only in this way can the active forces of
interpretation or assimilation, by which the artist as well as the
meanest of us fills out the incoming suggestions of the given, achieve
adequate expression. A psychologist might perhaps describe the
difference between a faithful transcription of an actual scene and such
an effort of the creative imagination as we have just been studying, by
saying that the one is a representation of the incoming or given ideas
or sensations, while Turner’s picture represents these same ideas or
sensations after they have been thoroughly ‘apperceived’ by the masses
of ideas stored in the artist’s mind. If we adopt such a description, we
must not forget to add that Turner has used his knowledge of the
mechanism of the pictorial language to set out his total idea for us in
the clearest and pleasantest way.
As with the Heysham sketch, so with the Hornby.[28] I need perhaps
hardly call attention to the deliberate heightening of Hornby Castle,
and to the way the back of the nearer hill in front of it has been
humped in the finished design. This deliberate falsification (as it must
seem to the literalist) is paralleled by the treatment of the foreground
tree, whose individuality is destroyed, and whose place is taken by a
mere alien grown in the fertile climate of the artist’s imagination. I
have no doubt that if Turner could have got the same effect without
making these alterations he would not have made them. But it is obvious
that he could not. From his point of view such alterations are merely
grammatical devices by which he throws the required emphasis on
qualities which hills and trees do undeniably possess, but which were
somewhat slurred over in nature’s momentary presentment of the case. And
if we think about the matter calmly, we see that we cannot expect any
object to enter into new relations without undergoing some kind of
modification; I mean that we cannot expect physical facts to be taken up
into the intelligible world and used as factors in the expression of
ideas and emotions without requiring some kind of modification.
While Turner was producing these exquisite drawings for Whitaker’s
_History of Richmondshire_, he also executed a series of ten or eleven
slightly smaller drawings to illustrate Sir Walter Scott’s _Provincial
Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland_. Eight of these
drawings were presented by the publishers to Scott, who had them framed
from an oak felled on the Abbotsford estate during Turner’s visit there
in 1818. The effect of this frame on the drawings, it must be confessed,
is atrocious. It might be guaranteed to kill the effect of any
water-colour drawings but the radiantly immortal ones for which it was
made. No doubt even these would look better out of it, but such as it is
it hung in the breakfast-room at Abbotsford till after Scott’s death,
and as it then hung, so it hangs now in Mr. Thomas Brocklebank’s
hospitable mansion at Heswall, Chester.
When we draw the curtain, which has kept Turner’s beautiful
[Illustration: _PLATE LX_
DINBURGH, FROM CALTON HILL
PENCIL. 1818]
[Illustration: EDINBURGH FROM CALTON HILL
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN SCOTT’S “PROVINCIAL ANTIQUITIES OF SCOTLAND,” 1
NOVEMBER, 1820]
[Illustration: _PLATE LX_
EDINBURGH FROM CALTON HILL
PENCIL. 1818]
[Illustration: FIGURES ON CALTON HILL
PENCIL. 1818]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXI_
BORTHWICK CASTLE
PENCIL. 1818]
[Illustration: BORTHWICK CASTLE
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN SCOTT’S “PROVINCIAL ANTIQUITIES OF SCOTLAND,” 2
APRIL, 1819]
work as fresh as when it was first executed, and look at these drawings,
it is difficult to single out any one of them for special attention. But
after looking through the engravings made from them in Scott’s book, the
marvellous view of ‘Edinburgh from the Calton Hill’ leaves perhaps the
most powerful impression on the imagination. I have, therefore, selected
the drawing made from nature upon which this design was based as the
subject of one of our illustrations (Plate LX.).
In this case we find that Turner has followed his sketch with great
care, yet the whole material has been hammered this way and that by his
powerful hand. We can see that the artist felt impatient with nature’s
calm and unhurried chronicle of facts, and was determined at all costs
to make a more immediate and concentrated attack on the spectator’s
powers of perception. Instead of stretching out calmly and indifferently
on both hands, as in the sketch, the city in the finished design seems
to soar upwards from the depths beneath our feet. The jail on our left
has been squeezed together, making the line from the porch to the
central turret much more oblique than it was. The perspective of nearly
all the buildings has been modified, yet the artist has taken great care
to preserve the character of the silhouettes of the leading planes. But
it is in the invention of the play of light which animates the whole,
and throws into such strong relief all the telling points of the design,
that we find the clearest evidence of the artist’s active intervention.
A curious instance of Turner’s habit of using his notes rather as hints
to his imagination than as providing ready-made material waiting for
immediate incorporation, is afforded by the sketches of some figures
made while he was standing on the Calton Hill. On the back of one of the
pages on which our view of Edinburgh is drawn, there is a rough sketch
of the brow of the hill with groups of figures on it. Among these
figures are three girls attending to the drying of the clothes they have
washed. One of these is standing shaking out a cloth in the wind. But
though Turner has introduced this incident into the foreground of his
picture, the figure there is not a repetition of the graceful figure in
the sketch. In the picture the action has been changed, and the figure
presented in a different point of view. It is designed altogether
afresh. In the same way none of the other figures is repeated in the
finished drawing. The figures in the drawing are indeed the same sort of
people as in the sketch, but each is designed specially for its place,
and with reference to the movement of the whole picture. All this is
eminently characteristic of the cast of Turner’s mind, which seems to
store scenes and incidents in complete independence of their momentary
and particular appearance; he is thus able to set these invisible
essences in motion before his mind’s eye, and to wait till they arrange
themselves to his complete satisfaction, and he has then no difficulty
in clothing them with the attributes of time and space.
We will turn now to a sketch of a different kind. In the ‘Edinburgh,’
‘Heysham’ and ‘Hornby’ sketches, as in most of those we have examined,
we have seen Turner making a note of what we may call the chief items of
the topographical data, leaving the problem of their arrangement,
modification and amplification for future solution. In the two sketches
of Rochester (Plates LXII. (_a_) and (_b_)) which I have had reproduced,
we see the artist’s mind moving on a different track. A few pages
earlier in the sketch-book from which these two leaves are taken, he has
indeed made his usual record of the facts about the church, bridge,
etc., at Rochester, but apparently, as time did not press, he remained
in his boat watching the scene and criticising, as one who understood
such things, nature’s own methods of design. His sketches now become not
topographical records but swift and eloquent designs for pictures. The
concrete particularity of the castle, church, bridge, etc., becomes
abrogated or submerged. These objects are now taken up into a new kind
of systematic unity, in which their relationship to the whole and to
each other is of much more importance than their discrete individuality.
Now, the important point is just how the Castle and the other
topographical items drop into place with regard to the shipping on the
river,--the kind of groups they all make, the way the one item affects
the other, half hiding it or setting it off to advantage. In the sketch
on page 18 of the sketch-book (Plate LXII. (_a_)) the exact position of
the mast of the foreground vessel is the dominant factor,--the way it
unites the lines described by the silhouette of the castle and the trees
sloping down to the bridge, bringing the
[Illustration: _PLATE LXII_
ROCHESTER
PENCIL. ABOUT 1821]
[Illustration: ROCHESTER
PENCIL. ABOUT 1821]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXIII_
ROCHESTER. ON THE RIVER MEDWAY
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1822]
curves to a focus, as it were, and providing a rigid base for them to
spring from again. In the other sketch (Plate LXII. (_b_)) Turner is
trying a different arrangement of the material, or, to put it more
accurately, nature is trying another effect, and Turner is watching and
making notes of the experiment.
In this way, before Turner shut up his book he had made over a dozen
skeleton designs, which he had only to clothe in colour and light and
shade to develop into beautiful pictures. But when he got home and
actually set to work to make the drawing of Rochester for the _Rivers of
England_ series, he deliberately ignored every one of nature’s pregnant
suggestions, and began to build up his own design in his own way.
Perhaps he thought nature’s designs wanted more space than he had at his
command in a plate that was to be only a few inches square; perhaps it
was the sheer delight in the exercise of his creative powers that was
the main motive force, for though his sketch-books teem with designs
caught in this way on the wing, yet he never once, so far as I can
discover, adopted one of them in his own pictures, without so modifying
and recasting it as to make it into a quite new and independent
construction.
I am not at all sure of the exact date when the sketch of Bolton Abbey
(Plate LXIV.) was made. It is the sketch upon which the water-colour
engraved in the _England and Wales_ series was based. The engraving was
published in 1827, so the water-colour must have been made a year or two
earlier, but as the sketch occurs in a book which contains a number of
the _Devonshire Rivers_ subjects, it probably belongs to about the time
of Turner’s second visit to Devonshire. This visit took place in either
1812 or 1813, and the Wharfedale sketches, of which the ‘Bolton’ is one,
cannot have been later than 1815. So it is probable that at least ten
years elapsed between the making of the sketch and the water-colour
drawing in which the sketch was elaborated.
The drawing itself is one of the most universally admired of all the
_England and Wales_ subjects. Mr. Ruskin alludes to it again and again
in the various volumes of _Modern Painters_. In the fourth volume
(chapter xvi.) he gives an admirable analysis of the imaginative
conception, and in volume three (chapter ix.) he dwells with his usual
eloquence on the knowledge displayed in the treatment of the foreground
trees. With the general tenor of these remarks I am in entire agreement,
and if the passages were not so long I should like to introduce them
here, but unless the reader is very careful, I am inclined to think that
Mr. Ruskin’s constant appeal to ‘the facts’ is likely to mislead him
into the belief that all the details of the design, and especially those
of the foreground trees, are elaborately studied and accurately
reproduced from the actual scene. Turner’s sketch proves that this was
not the case. Each individual tree, every curve in its trunk, the
texture of its bark, the stains and hollows and flickering lights and
shadows upon it, and the intricate play of the trees’ upper branches,
all these have been, not painstakingly studied from nature, but invented
by the artist in his studio, and each detail has been invented not
entirely for its own sake, but as a note, a chord, in the whole complex
of visible harmony.
I do not think any more wonderful example could be given of the intense
activity of creative genius than that which is furnished by a careful
comparison of this drawing with the sketch upon which it was based. We
look at the sketch, and all the subject seems there; as a synopsis of
the finished picture it seems tolerably complete. Yet in the drawing we
find almost every detail has been altered. Notice the way the foreground
trees have been pushed nearer to each other. In the sketch one has to
search for the abbey, and then one’s eyes begin to wander about
aimlessly. But in the drawing everything is brought into connection with
everything else; it is all welded together. The abbey is the first thing
one sees, then the eye goes easily and inevitably to the second couple
of foreground trees, the seated angler and the distant river-bank. In
passing from one object to the other the eye feels something of the same
kind of pleasure that the ear takes in the rhythm of verse, so that
one’s gaze travels over the drawing not vagrantly and with effort, but
gladly, and to the spectator all this visible melody and delight seem
like the unconscious expression of the secret joy with which the
artist’s mind played round the scene, an echo of the mysterious music of
his happy memories.
The effect of the ‘Bolton’ drawing is that of a bright summer’s
[Illustration: _PLATE LXIV_
BOLTON ABBEY
PENCIL. ABOUT 1815]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXV_
BOLTON ABBEY
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “PICTURESQUE VIEWS IN ENGLAND AND WALES,” 1827]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXVI_
COLCHESTER
PENCIL. ABOUT 1824]
[Illustration: COLCHESTER
PENCIL. ABOUT 1824]
[Illustration: _PLATE. LXVII_
COLCHESTER, ESSEX
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “PICTURESQUE VIEWS IN ENGLAND AND WALES,” 1827]
afternoon, an effect that does not change very rapidly; the slightness
of Turner’s sketch was not, therefore, a necessary outcome of the
transitory nature of his subject-matter. Had he been so minded he could
easily have painted the whole subject out-of-doors. But with the
‘Colchester’ drawing, another of the _England and Wales_ subjects,
published about the same time as the ‘Bolton,’ the case was different.
There the effect is a momentary one. It is evening, the shades of
twilight have gathered, and the sun is on the point of disappearing.
There was only time for a few hasty memoranda; but while the modern
artist would almost invariably make his memoranda in colour, Turner is
quite satisfied with his usual hurried pencil notes. In the sketches
here reproduced (Plate LXVI.) we have a kind of abstract of the whole
scene. There is the miller’s house beside the river at the foot of the
hill, while the hill is crowned by a row of trees through which the
abbey building and the roofs of the distant town can be seen. The
position of the sun and of its reflection in the river are marked.
The general idea of the whole is certainly there in the sketches, but in
a rudimentary or indeterminate condition. Note how deliberately vague
and undefined the idea of the trees on the brow of the hill has been
kept. A distant abbey-building set in the delicate tracery of gracefully
branching trees, the whole framed in masses of feathery foliage, that
was the general idea of this part of the design, and Turner knew that he
was familiar enough with the nature and ways of trees to be able to
carry out this idea with all the requisite wealth of detail whenever he
should set himself seriously to the task. The exact shapes of the trees
actually growing there on the hillside on the day and at the moment when
he made this sketch were, apart from their general idea, a matter of
indifference to him. If he had cared very much about them he could
easily have gone there the next morning and drawn them carefully; they
would hardly have altered much in the night. But these shapes would have
surely wanted revision, alteration and suppression, before they could
have taken their places as a perfectly articulated limb in Turner’s
living, organic design. The result could not have been more satisfactory
than the one reached without this labour.
As with the row of trees, so with the miller’s house, the cottages
creeping up the hillside and the distant town. The pencil hieroglyphs
are enough to suggest the general idea of these objects, their
appropriate particularities will unroll themselves from the stored
treasures of Turner’s mind so soon as he takes his pencil in hand again
to carry forward his work; not the actual details of the cottages, etc.,
existing down there in Essex, but the details appropriate to the picture
as an expression of an emotional experience.
The drawings in the _England and Wales_ series produced in this way, in
which a definite particular experience of the artist is enshrined as it
were in a wealth of appropriate and beautifully arranged shapes and
colours, are among the best of the series. But the pressure of
professional engagements did not always permit the artist to wait for
this kind of inspiration. On such occasions he appears to have fallen
back on the material stored in his early sketch-books, and his
rhetorical mastery of the elements of design was taxed to the uttermost
to provide it with suitable clothing and ornament. An excellent example
of this kind of work is provided by the drawing of Stamford, published
in 1830. This was founded on one of the sketches made during Turner’s
first tour in the North of England, in 1797. This sketch (Plate LXVIII.)
is no doubt a fairly accurate record of the place, its humdrum streets
and houses, with its three triumphant bursts of idealism in the shape of
its three unimaginative church towers.
In taking up this sketch thirty years after it was made, Turner seems to
have asked himself, ‘What am I to do to make this dull affair into
something universally interesting?’ that is to say, into something
interesting and even amusing to those who care nothing for Stamford
merely for its own sake. Of course the first thing for him to do was
obviously to seize upon the three towers and make the most of them,
setting them up against a gorgeous sky filled with rain and thunder and
the darting rays of the thwarted sun, which, however, must so far
triumph in its contest as to flood the towers with its light and
transfigure them with its splendour. The street below remains dull and
untractable, but yet something may be made of it. We can gain one point
by insisting on the smallness and homeliness of the houses, intensifying
their
[Illustration: _PLATE LXVIII_
STAMFORD, LINCOLNSHIRE
PENCIL. 1797]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXIX_
STAMFORD, LINCOLNSHIRE
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “PICTURESQUE VIEWS IN ENGLAND AND WALES,” 1830]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXX_
TYNEMOUTH PRIORY
PENCIL, WITH PART IN WATER COLOUR. 1797.]
[Illustration: TYNEMOUTH, NORTHUMBERLAND
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN “PICTURESQUE VIEWS IN ENGLAND AND WALES,” 1831]
unimaginative character into something approaching the grotesque. Better
the actively ugly, for that at least makes our dullest and largest
church tower look almost beautiful by contrast, than the passively
commonplace. And then, lest our modest efforts remain of small avail, we
invent a couple of quaint old travellers hurrying across the road to
their inn, accompanied by the barks and gambols of a lively little white
dog; by good luck and our own skilful management they come just in front
of our dull row of houses, so that what with one thing and another we
find our eyes and thoughts very pleasantly diverted. As for the houses
on the left we can shut off a great part of them by simply drawing up a
lumbering stage-coach on that side of the road and heaping it with ample
females in swelling draperies, with burgeoning umbrellas and bounteous
baggage. And having got so far, we can now see exactly what it is we
want to make our foreground and distance more immediately effective. In
the sketch there is a hint that the road dips just a trifle down from
the foreground to the church; we increase this slight inequality till we
get a dip of something like forty or fifty feet between us and the
church, a drop that gives uncommon height and dignity to our humble
towers. And now, having got our street laid out to our liking, we want
to make the most of its possibilities, so we set another stage-coach
down at the foot of our little hill, load it with passengers impatient
to be out of their wet clothes, and give it a couple of rearing,
prancing, steaming horses to gallop it in hot haste up the declivity, so
that now, as we look at the engraving, we can almost hear the ring of
the horses’ hooves on the stones and feel the rush of wind made by the
coach as it dashes past us; all this merely by way of amplifying the
artist’s statement about his imaginary hill, and to drive the idea of
his well-invented fiction home into the consciousness of even the
dullest of his audience.
The ‘Tynemouth’ design, published in 1831, is on a higher plane of
imaginative creation than the ‘Stamford’ subject, yet it was built up in
just the same way from a sketch made at the same time on another leaf of
the same sketch-book. The ‘Stamford’ design shows Turner struggling
valiantly against the absence of any very pressing inspiration, and
emerging with credit from the ordeal; the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing, on the
other hand, shows that his youthful and thirty-year old topographical
sketch had served to set his imagination aflame with all the urgency of
a recent personal experience. The vision conjured up by what I can only
call the potential or possible associations of a rocky coast had so much
completeness, so much innate driving force, that Turner had no need to
resort to the purely external and arbitrary tricks of composition which
had proved such valuable auxiliaries in the ‘Stamford’ drawing. In the
case of the ‘Stamford’ subject, we might almost say that the pictorial
equivalent of the rhyme and metre had suggested the sense; in the case
of the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing the idea itself is so vivid that it creates
its own lilt and harmony.
In looking through a number of Turner’s drawings the hasty
observer--especially should he be a professional student eager to pick
up useful knowledge--is inclined to jump to the conclusion that the
important thing about rocks and mountains is to be high, and that when
the height of the most prominent buildings, especially if they happen to
be in ruins, has been increased three or fourfold, all the duties of the
imaginative designer have been attended to. In the ‘Tynemouth’ drawing
we see how free Turner is from the constraint of any such ready-made and
purely external rules of design. He has here deliberately lowered the
apparent height of his buildings and cliffs, and, if we examine the
matter carefully, we see that he has done this not at the dictates of a
passing whim or fancy, but because the heart of the matter--the
so-called ‘subject,’ that vague, intangible, elusive something which
seems to sit in the centre of the dynamical idea and pump blood and life
into every outlying portion of the organism, and tyrannises so
beneficently over the structure and function of each part of the
design--because this heart of the matter would clearly have it so.
In the sketch we have an item of brute fact waiting, as it were,
pathetically to be taken up into the world of thought and feeling,
asking, so to speak, to be made significant and human. The artist has
granted the request in his finished design by making the physical facts
the mere passive spectators of man’s sorrow and suffering. In the
sketch, the tall cliffs and ruined walls of the priory tower above the
small fishing-boat struggling into port; in the picture, the tall masts
of the wrecked schooner dwarf the priory and the cliffs and drive them
into subordination. The real centre of interest is the active, restless
power of the sea for ill. The baneful little leaps of the waves that
fill nearly all the lower part of the design tell their story of storm
and wreck plainly enough. The wrecked barques under the cliffs are in a
sad plight, but the pieces of floating mast and broken plank in the
foreground tell of worse things. On the shore we have the thrifty
gatherers of flotsam and jetsam, and a crowd of willing helpers. On all
this moving scene the wreck of the priory looks down not without
sympathy; it too, it seems to say, is a part of man’s activity and
ambition, it suffers also from the taint of mortality and from the
merciless power of the wind and rain.