MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DECAY, AND THE ORIGIN OF IMPRESSIONISM--1830-1845
Mental characteristics of 1815-1830 period--Their influence on
form--and colour--Colour enrichment a general characteristic of
Romantic Art--What further development is required to give us the
transition to Impressionism?--The first of Turner’s so-called
Impressionistic works--Vagueness or indistinctness as a means of
expression--Two ways of painting one’s impressions--Turner’s
earlier way--contrasted with the modern Impressionistic way--The
change, after 1830, is it a change in terms of sight or of
thought--visual or mental?--The content of Turner’s later work--The
relation of Turner’s later work to Impressionism defined--The
gradual development of Turner’s later manner--The Petworth sketches
(1830)--The discovery of the artistic value of the
indeterminate--The Vignettes-‘Rivers of France’--Venetian sketches
(1834-1840)--Swiss and Rhine sketches (1841-1844)--The end.
When we try to make clear to ourselves the inner characteristics of the
period studied in the last chapter, we notice at once a change from the
gloom, sternness and patient endurance of the earlier decade to a
brighter and more cheerful frame of mind. Turner’s predominant frame of
mind is proud and happy. He seems to rejoice in the splendour of the
world and exult over the richness and variety of its material. His
attitude towards humanity is not so easily defined. In the best of his
oil paintings, as in the ‘Pas de Calais’ (‘Now for the Painter’), and in
his water colours, there is an abundance of close and sympathetic
observation of the labours and sorrow of mankind. But in spite of the
graces of a naturally kind heart Turner’s attitude towards these labours
and sufferings is not entirely free from traces of hardness and
selfishness. His instinct for the picturesque side of this kind of
subject-matter is so keen, and his insistence on this picturesqueness is
so constant and so emphatic, that it is hard to resist the suspicion
that his interest is rather professional than personal. He does not seem
to feel himself an actor and a fellow-sufferer. He was on the other side
of the fence; he was the artist, and labouring, suffering mankind his
material. And so far as he himself was concerned he had every reason for
exultation. The nature that could endow a humbly born youth with such
gifts as he possessed, and the society that had rewarded these talents
so generously, might be said to have fairly earned the young painter’s
gratitude. He gave it effusively, with none of the ulterior reserves an
educated Greek would have felt in the presence of a great happiness or
pre-eminent success.
Let us now turn to the outward and visible results of this exultant and
somewhat heartless and selfish enjoyment. The movement of the design,
the quality of the tone and colour, and the spirit of the handling of
the pictures in which such a frame of mind is expressed, could not
possibly be the same as in Turner’s earlier pictures. The sober and
restrained colouring of pictures like the ‘Windsor,’ the ‘Frosty
Morning’ and ‘The Nore,’ is in perfect harmony with the patient strength
and sternness of the emotional colouring of their inspiration. The same
mood could not be expressed in any other scheme of lighting and colour.
But to treat what, for want of a better word, I may call a pictorial
metre, as though it were equally admirable as a means of expression for
all kinds and shades of emotion, would argue an extraordinary dulness or
sheer absence of artistic capacity; and Turner’s shortcomings, if he had
any, were moral rather than artistic.
Given then the mood of exultant enjoyment of the physical amenities of
the world, a lighter and brighter colour scheme than that of Turner’s
earlier pictures was bound to be forthcoming, if that mood was to be
fully expressed by pictorial art. And as a matter of history Turner was
the first modern artist in the range of landscape art to give adequate
expression to this sentiment of unrestrained enjoyment of the physical
delights of nature, though we see the same swelling sense of the pride
of life finding a similar form of expression in the works of
contemporary figure-painters like Sir Thomas Lawrence, Shee and Hayter
in England, and Delacroix, Isabey, and others in France.
In the present chapter I propose to deal with the closing phase of
Turner’s art. In the works of this period Turner has been said to have
initiated a new kind of art, or at least to have invented or introduced
certain important innovations in the region of colour and tone, which
have had the effect of developing new possibilities in the art of
landscape-painting. It is from this point of view, and with reference to
this aspect of Turner’s work, that he has been hailed as the father of
Impressionism. Before discussing the value of the innovations Turner
introduced and their influence on subsequent developments of the art, it
is important to study the immediate causes which brought them into
existence. In other words, we must study this new phase of Turner’s art
in relation to its immediate antecedents; in the first place, to see how
far it can be regarded as a necessary development of what had gone
before, and in the second place, to discover exactly what is new in it.
The two most striking characteristics of Turner’s later work are the
brightness and extended range of his colour schemes. But this formal
characteristic is clearly taken over bodily from the previous period,
and we have just seen that it was but the necessary outward expression
of the spiritual content with which Turner was then preoccupied. In a
picture like ‘Ulysses deriding Polyphemus’ (1829), for example, we have
a colour scheme as bright and as extended as that of any of the later
works, and yet it is emphatically a work of the Romantic period. It is
all ablaze with the light and flame of human pride. Its gorgeous array
of blues, its burnished gold and glowing crimson and scarlet and white
are but the triumphant expression of the mood of unrestrained sensuous
enjoyment which formed the key-note of the work we have just been
examining.
But if the lightening of the colour scheme was simply an inheritance
from the Romantic phase of art, what are we to regard as the special
contribution of the later manner? A comparison of a few of Turner’s
later works with the ‘Ulysses’ will show us at once. The earliest
example of Turner’s later and so-called Impressionistic manner with
which I am familiar is the ‘Calais Sands, low water--Poissards
collecting bait,’ which was exhibited in 1830, and is now in the Bury
Art Gallery. Its colour
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXI_
BEMERSIDE TOWER
PENCIL. ABOUT 1831]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXII_
BEMERSIDE TOWER
ENGRAVING PUBLISHED IN SCOTT’S “POETICAL WORKS” (CADELL), 1834]
scheme is actually more subdued than the ‘Ulysses,’ but the whole effect
is more vaporous and the figures are less distinct. So far as I am able
to judge, this is the chief _differentia_ of Turner’s later manner, and
of all Impressionistic work on its formal side. As a second
characteristic we may add the fact that it deals with a scene of
contemporary life, something that Turner had actually seen with his
eyes, not something that he had read about and imagined, as in the
‘Ulysses.’
If we examine ‘The Evening Star’ and ‘At Petworth’ (both at the Tate
Gallery), the ‘Snowstorm’ of 1842, the late Venetian pictures, and the
‘Rain, Storm, Speed’ of 1844, we find these works are all similarly
distinguished by their general vagueness of definition and by the fact
that they all represent scenes which had come within the range of the
artist’s own experience.
Yet it is evident that these two characteristics are not of equal
importance. The vagueness of definition was a general characteristic of
all Turner’s later work, but a considerable number of these works were
purely imaginary compositions, as for example the ‘Agrippina landing
with the Ashes of Germanicus’ (1839), ‘The Exile and the rock limpet’
(1842), ‘The Evening of the Deluge’ (1843), ‘Queen Mab’s Cave’ (1846),
and the various ‘Whaler’ pictures (1845 and 1846). There is obviously,
then, no necessary connection between Turner’s vagueness of execution
(his distinctively Impressionist manner) and his choice of subject of
which he had been actually an eye-witness.
Besides, we must remember that Turner did not wait till his later years
before beginning to paint his own impressions. He had been busy painting
them ever since he had come to artistic maturity. His ‘Calais Pier’
(1803), the ‘Spithead’ (1809), ‘Petworth--Dewy Morning’ (1810),
‘Teignmouth’ and ‘Hulks on the Tamar’ (1811 and 1812), and ‘Frosty
Morning’ (1813),--to name only a few--were certainly works of this kind;
as were the ‘Hedging and Ditching’ of the _Liber_ and the ‘Colchester’
of the _England and Wales_ series. But there is no lack of determination
in the execution of these works. The difference between Turner’s later
attempts to paint his impressions and his earlier must therefore be
found in his attitude towards these impressions--the principle of
selection, of suppression and adjustment upon which he dealt with the
data of sense-perception; and this brings us to the consideration of the
_rationale_ of that vagueness of execution which we have agreed to
regard as the chief characteristic of Turner’s later work.
An ingenious and at first somewhat plausible attempt has been made to
explain the peculiarities of Turner’s later style, on the ground that
old age and failing health had brought about an actual organic change in
the artist’s powers of sight. But it seems to me that Dr. Liebreich’s
arguments[29] and conclusions are vitiated by his failure to
discriminate between Turner’s manner of expression and the action of his
eyesight. These are two clearly distinct operations. Between the act of
seeing and an artist’s fully organised manner of expression, a whole
host of considerations--among them the limitations and capacities of the
material--interpose themselves. These considerations must all receive
their due weight. I know several very short-sighted artists whose
pictures are remarkable for their elaborate and sharply defined details,
and there are others with strong and good eyesight, whose pictures are
confused and indistinct. An artist puts into his pictures only what he
chooses to put there. And when we work out in detail the reasons why
Turner chose to make his drawings indistinct, we find that such
considerations are quite sufficient by themselves to account for his
change of style, without having recourse to any hypothetical alteration
in his organs of sight.
The clue, then, to the nature of Turner’s later manner of expression is
to be found in the character not of his optical sensations but of his
thought, or in other words, upon the mode in which his intelligent self
reacted upon the immediate data of sense-perception. By the time he had
reached the period with which we are now concerned, he had lost much of
his interest in the material world. He cared no longer for the strength
and weight, the toughness and tang of material; that delight in the
solidity of real objects which gives such a manly gusto to his early
sea-pieces, is now altogether absent from his work. He cares no longer
for the company of men, or for their avocations or joys and sorrows. He
is now a lonely old man, with his thoughts mainly centred upon himself,
upon his artistic genius, his artistic fame, and the visions of future
pictures by which his genius was to continue to manifest itself, and by
which his fame was to be increased or sustained.
We have then to think of Turner as a solitary dreamer of dreams, with a
professional interest in the capacity of these dreams to startle a
rather stupid public. If we want to enter intimately into the spiritual
and emotional content of his dreams we have only to turn to the
contemporary works of the poets. In pictures like ‘The Fountain of
Indolence,’ the ‘Agrippina’ and those I have mentioned above, we see how
deeply impressed his mind had become with the ideals of current Romantic
poetry; the true Byronic disgust with himself and vague emotions of the
infinite, the desire to
‘steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express.’
There is no doubt that these obscure emotions and vague reveries can
only be adequately expressed in one particular way. They defy embodiment
in clear-cut determinate forms. They demand a style as indeterminate, as
vaguely suggestive, as inarticulate as the loose-knit dreams which are
calling for embodiment.
This, then, I take to be the proper explanation of the vagueness of
Turner’s later manner: It is not that he saw the world indistinctly, but
that his ideas were incapable of definition; it is not that his eyes
were newly opened to the vapours and mists of the physical world, but
that his own thoughts were confused and his emotions, in spite of their
strength, were incoherent and inarticulate.
* * * * *
We are now in a position to define the relation in which Turner’s later
works stand to modern Impressionism. The exact connotation of this term
is not by any means easy to grasp, but so far as Impressionism has
distinctive aims I think we are justified in describing them as the
attempt to eliminate all those elements in art which are due to the
reaction of the intelligent self upon the immediate data of
sense-perception. The aim of Impressionism is to get rid of what one
eminent psychologist has called the noëtic fringe in a state of
consciousness, to abstract from memory and see objects as simple visual
elements. The Impressionist wishes to see objects as though he was
looking at them for the first time, as though they had no meaning for
him. The theoretic justification of this procedure is that, in stripping
off the formative and organising action of intelligence we isolate the
pure element of objective reality; that pictures painted upon this
principle give the real truth of nature and are free from all those
errors and distortions which the action of thought is supposed to
introduce into the irrefragably trustworthy elements of the given. These
assumptions are, I need hardly add, untenable, but this is not the place
to criticise them.
Now if Impressionism aims at getting rid of all the cognitive elements
in concrete perception (recognition, classing, naming, etc.) as well as
the later processes of interpretation and associative reflection, and
would express only the bare sensational element of impression, it is
clear that Turner cannot be properly described as an Impressionist.
Turner’s artistic aim was consistently lyrical, _i.e._ strongly
subjective and emotional, while the chief aim of Impressionism is to
eliminate all the merely subjective colouring from perception, with the
single purpose of isolating and reproducing what is regarded as the
objective element. So far, then, as Impressionism has adopted Turner’s
results, it seems open to the charge of having done so without
understanding their real nature or significance.
Yet this result, however helpful it may prove to the student of
present-day art, cannot be wholly satisfactory from another point of
view. From the point of view of Turner’s work our result is largely
negative. We have endeavoured to make it clear that to regard his later
work as a new and triumphant attempt to represent what is called the
‘truths of nature’ is pure misunderstanding; that Turner’s aim is not to
represent either truths of atmosphere, of lighting or of natural colour,
or any kind or class of physical fact; that he is busied mainly with his
own emotions and fancies, and that he is concerned with the objective
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXIII_
MEN CHATTING ROUND FIREPLACE: PETWORTH HOUSE
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1830]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXIV_
TEASING THE DONKEY: PETWORTH
WATER COLOUR; ON BLUE. ABOUT 1830]
world only indirectly and only in so far as it furnishes or suggests the
stuff out of which his pictorial symbols are woven. But we have still to
search for the secret power of attraction which these symbols do
unquestionably possess. Why is it, we must ask, that these signs and
symbols have such power to move men, to delight and intoxicate some, to
soothe and cheer others?
The answers to these questions may be conveniently grouped under two
heads. In the first place we may consider what are the attractions which
Turner’s work shares with the Romantic poets whose works express the
same kind of subject-matter, and in the second place we may attempt to
indicate what are the qualities which are more intimately connected with
his own individuality.
In the first place then, when we consider Turner as a fellow-worker with
Byron, Shelley, and Lamartine, we see that like them he appeals
constantly and unerringly to that illusion of the romantic temperament
which lends a mysterious charm to all that is indefinite and
indefinable. In a singularly acute analysis of this temperament Mr.
George Santayana has traced one of the chief causes of the delight which
this kind of art and poetry awakens to what he calls ‘the illusion of
infinite perfection.’ There is, he says, a loose and helpless state of
mind to which we all of us approximate when in a state of fatigue. In
this state of mind we are not capable of concentrated and serious
attention to one thing at a time, so we are apt to ‘flounder in the
vague, but at the same time we are full of yearnings, of half-thoughts
and semi-visions, and the upward tendency and exaltation of our mood is
emphatic and overpowering in proportion to our incapacity to think,
speak, or imagine. The sum of our incoherencies has, however, an
imposing volume and even, perhaps, a vague, general direction. We feel
ourselves laden with an infinite burden; and what delights us most and
seems to us to come nearest to the ideal, is not what embodies any one
possible form, but that which, by embodying none, suggests many, and
stirs the mass of our inarticulate imagination with a pervasive
thrill.... That infinite perfection which cannot be realised, because it
is self-contradictory, may be thus suggested, and on account of this
suggestion an indeterminate effect may be regarded as higher, more
significant, and more beautiful than any determinate one.’[30] These
remarks help us to understand the positive qualities of Turner’s
indeterminate style; its power of evoking a fallacious sense of
profundity and significance, just because of its indeterminateness, its
power of suggesting and stimulating emotion, just because it is
incoherent and variously interpretable.
Yet when we have pressed these considerations to their extreme limit, we
have only drawn attention to certain qualities which Turner’s later work
shares with that of many indifferent artists and poets, and, far from
exhausting the real and permanent elements of value in that work, they
may be justly regarded as a searching and pitiless exposure of its
weaknesses and defects. But we are on firmer ground when we turn to the
purely personal qualities in this work, to the artist’s delicacy of hand
and fineness of sight. It matters not what instrument Turner is working
with, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush, or whether he is
working hurriedly or at leisure, the movement of his hand is always
graceful and delightful. His powers of sight also seem to me to have
been quite extraordinary; I do not mean that he had merely the power of
seeing distant objects distinctly, not mere long-sightedness, though he
seems to have had this faculty in an abundant measure, but a quite
unusual power of discriminating between minute shades of light and
colour. As the born musician is distinguished from other men by his
capacity for detecting differences of sound which to others seem the
same, so the evidence of Turner’s work--and all who have attempted to
copy even the slightest of his sketches will, I am sure, bear me out in
this--shows that he possessed an abnormal power of visual
discrimination. No doubt his early training and especially the influence
of Dayes had something to do with the development of this capacity, but
the capacity itself was largely innate. In addition to these two natural
gifts, an abnormal delicacy of hand and eye, Turner had the priceless
advantage of being passionately and unfalteringly in love with his art.
Some of the greatest artists give me the impression of loving their art
less for its own sake than for the sake of the content which it enables
them to express,--Rembrandt and Jean François Millet, for example, give
me this impression, and I do not think that their greatness is
imperilled in the least by it--but Turner seems to me to have loved his
art, especially in his later years, entirely for its own sake. This
strong and deep affection threw a glamour over every detail of his work.
Nothing was too high or too low for him. He brought the same
inexhaustible patience and alertness of attention to the working out of
a complicated problem of perspective as to the finishing of his most
ambitious pictures. Like Wordsworth’s ‘happy warrior’ in the midst of
danger, he had only to take a pencil into his hand to become ‘attired
with sudden brightness, like a Man inspired.’ This concentration, this
master-bias, throws a fervour and an inimitable charm over what it seems
almost ironical to speak of as the mechanical execution of his works.
It is difficult to define the exact relationship of Turner’s love for
his art, with his passionate and unwearying study of natural phenomena.
My own impression is that his love of nature was at best to some extent
subordinate to his love of art; that he loved nature partly at least as
a means to artistic expression, and not altogether for itself. But
however this may be, the extent of his knowledge of, and intimate
familiarity with, nature’s ways counts for much in the attractions of
his pictures. The evidence of his keen though intermittent study of
natural phenomena is writ large in the collection of his sketch-books.
The very extent of his knowledge, no doubt, led at times to a certain
overcrowding of his works, but it forms the secret of his supple and
ample style, and the inexhaustible fecundity of his invention.
It is then to the magic of his style that Turner’s later works owe a
great deal of their strange power of compelling attention and extorting
a sometimes unwilling admiration. He had in a quite pre-eminent degree
what Reynolds has called the genius of mechanical execution. And this
power is as remarkable in his earlier works as in his later. But in his
earlier works this power was used to give definite embodiment to a range
of worthy and significant ideas and emotions, and the sheer beauty of
their content is apt to divert our attention from the consummate skill
implied in this rarest and highest artistic achievement. But in the
later work the very weakness and poverty of the content has the effect
of keeping our attention fixed upon the suggestiveness and visual beauty
of the material elements of expression. In the poetry of the French
Symbolists we see a somewhat similar effect consciously aimed at. The
poverty of thought is used as a foil to throw the greatest possible
emphasis on the beauty of sounds and the faint suggestions of individual
words. In this way the attenuation of significance in Turner’s later
works throws into startling prominence all the innate and intrinsic
splendours of the painter’s palette.
We shall have occasion to amplify and illustrate these observations as
we trace the gradual development of Turner’s later manner, the task to
which we have now to address ourselves.
* * * * *
I have alluded above to what I regard as the first oil painting in which
the change that took place in Turner’s artistic aims about the year 1830
was clearly indicated. This was the ‘Calais Sands, low water,’ exhibited
at the Royal Academy in May, 1830. But before painting this picture
Turner had been experimenting in his new manner in a series of
water-colour sketches. These sketches were made at Petworth, where
Turner went to stay for a few weeks with Lord Egremont, probably in
1829, after his return from his second journey to Italy.
The two oil paintings of Petworth Park, still in the Petworth
collection, as well as the brilliant unfinished sketch of ‘Petworth
Park’ in the National Gallery (No. 559), were probably painted in the
house during this visit; at any rate, the sketches in water-colour upon
which these canvases were based were made at this time. But when Turner
was not busy at his easel or sketching in the park and neighbourhood, he
seems to have felt the time hang heavily on his hands, so, to save
himself from the ennui of small-talk and idleness, he began making
colour sketches, first of the various rooms, then of the furniture and
bric-à-brac, and finally of the people staying in the house. These
sketches, which number about a hundred, indicate clearly a distinct
change in Turner’s outlook upon nature. Up to this time he had
invariably employed form as the basis of his work. In these studies we
see him turning his attention directly to colour as the chief element
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXV_
HONFLEUR
BODY COLOUR ON BLUE. ABOUT 1830]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXVI_
COUNTRY TOWN ON STREAM
BODY COLOUR ON BLUE. ABOUT 1830]
of representation. The difference is no doubt largely a matter of
degree, for both elements are indispensable. Yet we have only to
compare, say, a drawing like that of ‘Rochester,’ in the _Rivers of
England_ series, with any one of the _Rivers of France_ subjects to see
that the change of emphasis, upon colour instead of form, was fraught
with important technical results. From a psychological point of view the
change is also significant. It shows that Turner was dissatisfied with
the language of form, which had served him so well all his life; the
vague unrest and conflicting emotions which now surged in his bosom
demanded a less static, a more fluent and elusive medium of expression.
Let us examine one of these Petworth subjects, a sketch of people
‘Waiting for Dinner.’ The scene takes place in a large drawing-room. The
fireplace comes in the centre of the design, and before it a corpulent
and dignified figure in evening dress stands facing us. On either side
there are groups of figures, also in evening dress, the white of the
ladies’ muslin frocks relieved with the yellow and black of an effulgent
matron and the black suits and scarlet uniforms of the men. Examined in
detail, the drawing of the figures is childish, but viewed at a proper
distance, so that the eye can range freely over it all without bringing
any one point into sharp focus, the effect is extraordinary. It is like
catching a glimpse of the actual scene. The whole goes together, the
room is filled with atmosphere, the sharp staccato touches sprinkled
with such amazing cunning among the floating wreaths of colour give
exactly that sense of relief which the eye experiences as it wanders
over an actual scene,--the sense of angles and sharp points of
resistance which artists speak of as the ‘lost and found’ of nature. The
very slightness of the execution of the drawing and the reckless
carelessness of the handling add to the feeling of immediate contact
with reality, for the lack of definition is indissolubly associated in
our minds with the experience of movement and change, and the figures
whose precise forms elude us seem only to be moving before our eyes. Yet
this effect would certainly not be produced were it not for the
wonderful accuracy and subtlety with which the relative values of the
masses of tone have been observed,--the relation, for instance, between
the exact shade of grey of the shirt-front of the noble lord with his
back to the fire and the exact tint of the firelight itself seen through
his legs, or, in short, between every touch of colour and the whole
which they constitute.
Yet when we compare this drawing with any of the more elaborately worked
ones, we cannot but realise the enormous importance of slightness of
definition as a means of expression. In the ‘Spinnet Player,’ for
example, we find the same skill in the observation and rendering of
tones as in ‘Waiting for Dinner,’ and the same extraordinary science of
colour declension; yet the effect it produces is one of static
unreality.
In this drawing a lady dressed in blue is seated in the foreground at a
spinnet; on the left, there is another lady in white on a couch, and on
the right, in the middle distance, a group of figures are seated round a
table apparently playing cards, while a figure in a light-coloured dress
stands behind the chair of one of the players. The objects on the wall
of the room, the near furniture and figures are all considerably more
defined than any of the objects in ‘Waiting for Dinner,’ but the
definition of these parts sets up a standard which condemns the drawing
as a whole. We feel disappointed, after getting so much definition, that
we do not get more. The middle-distance figures are so well drawn, or
rather are so vivaciously observed and full of individuality, that we
cannot help complaining that the foreground lady’s neck and shoulders
are impossible, and that the lady on the couch is so much like a wooden
doll. These observations suggest that each drawing sets up its own
standard of definition. The comparative failure of such a drawing could
not but help to impress on Turner the immense value for his purposes of
a wise and consistent vagueness of statement.
In the vignettes made to illustrate the works of Rogers, Scott, Byron
and Campbell we see the lesson of the Petworth experiments driven home.
Though these drawings were made expressly with the object of being
engraved in black and white, they are conceived entirely upon a colour
basis, while their lack of definition must have made quite unwarrantable
demands upon the skill and resources of the engravers. But it is evident
that Turner had now firmly grasped the fact that the glamour and
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXVII_
SHEEP IN THE TRENCH
BODY COLOUR ON BLUE. ABOUT 1830]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXVIII_
SHIPPING ON THE RIVA DEGLI SCHIAVONI. VENICE
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1839]
intoxication of colour had become the dominant and essential factor in
his art, and that the vagueness of his ideas could only be adequately
expressed by allusion and suggestion. These vignettes and the engravings
made from them vary widely in value. One or two of them are worthy of
the artist, for example the ‘Datur hora quieti,’ ‘The Alps at Daybreak’
and the ‘Melrose,’ but for the most part they owe the very great popular
success they have enjoyed to the skill with which the artist has entered
into the spirit of the second-and third-rate poetry he was called upon
to illustrate, and to the admirable way in which his suggestions were
engraved.
The designs for the _Rivers of France_ are conceived in a somewhat
similar strain of lyrical abandonment to the sensuous charm of colour.
Translated into mere black and white they leave us but half convinced.
It is rather like a prose translation into a foreign language of the
poetry of Victor Hugo, Swinburne or Shelley. To feel their full effect
we must turn to the original water-colours, with all their ravishing
intoxication of colour. It is as though our reason must needs be lulled
asleep by the dominant flood of purely sensuous delight, before we can
feel about these drawings as the artist would have us feel.
We have seen, in the case of the ‘Stamford’ design in the _England and
Wales_ series, that Turner’s interest in a place was specifically
different from that of a resident or an historian. He cares little or
nothing for local facts, merely as facts; his main concern is to skim
off from the surface of observation a few telling points, a few heads of
discourse as we might call them, which serve as a point of departure to
his own abundant pictorial improvisation. The result may be more or less
like the locality which furnishes the title of the drawing, but it is
never in any strict sense of the word an accurate representation of the
place. Yet the gulf that yawns between local fact and Turner’s lyrical
inspiration is never of quite the same character in the English drawings
as in the French. In both the gulf is wide, but in the English subjects
the artist’s intimate knowledge of the general characteristics of the
scenery gives such an air of plausibility to his improvisations that one
might be tempted to explain his poetical licences as the result of an
ardent striving after general and specific truth.[31] With the French
drawings it is impossible to make such a mistake. Turner was not at all
intimate with French scenery. He got up the subject in a most
perfunctory manner in a few short and hurried tours. He merely paid a
flying visit to the chief places mentioned in his guide-book and,
instead of studying what he saw with a moderate degree of attention, was
quite satisfied to look for mere hints of Turnerian phantasies; he did
not want facts, but suggestions for pictorial inventions. So that in
spite of his voluminous note-taking we find scarcely an accurate detail
in the whole of the sixty engravings. The twin towers of Tancarville
Castle are certainly the result of a misunderstanding of the hurried
sketch made on the spot, and I have no doubt that the ‘errors’ and
‘inaccuracies’ so relentlessly ferreted out by Mr. Hamerton, in the
representations of the Castle of Amboise, the towers of Notre Dame and
St. Jacques de la Boucherie, the old Hôtel de Ville and the Pump, were
caused in the same way. From the point of view of the topographer there
can be no doubt that Hamerton’s statement[32] that the engravings of
this series contain only ‘a sort of muddled reminiscence’ of the objects
and places Turner had seen is in the main correct.
The object of these remarks is far from that of suggesting that the
presence of ‘errors’ and ‘inaccuracies’ of this kind interferes in any
way with the purely artistic value of these drawings. It is rather to
emphasise the fact that it is only when we judge them from a totally
irrelevant point of view, that we can begin to talk of errors and
inaccuracies. Rightly understood these so-called errors and inaccuracies
are not only the justifiable licences of the artist, but the absolutely
inevitable and proper and solely right means of expression which the
artist had at his disposal. His aim is to produce a state of
consciousness in which feeling looms large, and thought-determination is
reduced almost to the vanishing point. One might say, without
exaggeration or unfairness, that mental confusion formed an important
part of his artistic aim. He had then to represent the objects he
depicted not as they appear to a cool, level-headed, and accurate
observer, but as they appear to a highly sensitive subject in a state of
morbid excitement.
If we look at Turner’s French drawings from this point of view, we
cannot but admit that they are almost all highly successful. They are
stamped with the impress of the genuinely romantic fervour, the lyrical
movement of unbridled feeling. In them the joy of artistic creation has
become triumphant, almost insolent. They are deep draughts of artistic
intoxication, exultant with the rush of man’s undying passion for
pleasure, and of the resistless energy that moulds the world of matter
into forms more harmonious with our own distinctly human cravings and
aspirations; Chateaux Gaillards or ‘Saucy Castles’ of the imagination
one might almost call them.
It was characteristic of Turner--I might almost say it was a necessity
of his position as a landscape painter--that he felt compelled to search
far and wide for material out of which to spin his web of visible
phantasy. The need of novel shapes, glowing colours, striking and
elaborate combinations was constantly felt. The rivers Meuse, Moselle
and Rhine were diligently and repeatedly explored. The East--for his
Bible illustrations--he was content to take at second-hand, through the
medium of other men’s sketches, but he sailed down the Danube, as far as
Vienna (or Buda-Pesth perhaps?), ransacked Germany, Italy, Switzerland,
France, Holland and Belgium and part of Austria. But as the years moved
on, his mental grip of the real world became always looser. His mind
played only with the fugitive shades on the surface of appearances; but
not with the elasticity, the free disinterestedness of youth and of the
young-hearted. The professional bias became ever more pronounced, the
point of view ever more abstract and one-sided.
One of his richest mines of pictorial imagery was Venice; not so much
the actual city of the Adriatic, as the fragmentary ideas of an ideal
Venice as they floated in the imagination of the ordinary
Englishman,--the unconscious crystallisation of the desires of the
average middle-class tourist for Southern warmth, freedom, colour,
variety, and bodily pleasure. With all the uncanny certainty of genius
he gathered up the threads of these incoherent and fugitive desires and
fixed them in the forms of immortality.
Let us look carefully at the two Venetian sketches here reproduced. In
‘Shipping on the Riva degli Schiavone’ (No. 55, N.G.) we see the
Campanile and Ducal Palace on the right, a blaze of warm, palpitating
light. In the centre there is a stretch of limpid green water, with a
tangle of boats on it leading the eye to the opalescent Madonna della
Salute in the extreme distance. There is a secondary group of shipping
on the left, among whose masts the tower of San Giorgio Maggiore can be
seen. No words can describe the intense blaze of light, the brilliance
of the colours and their perfect harmony. The execution is breathlessly
hurried and seemingly reckless, yet always perfectly under control; the
artist’s hand is so audaciously swift because the full value of his
colours can only be got in this way. Human skill can go no further in
this direction, and no reproduction can do anything like justice to the
wonderful original.
We find the same qualities in ‘The Approach to Venice: Sunset’ (51,
N.G.), and ‘Riva degli Schiavone, from near the Public Gardens’ (56,
N.G.).
In all these drawings Turner seems to be playing with his material
medium, fondling and caressing his colours and the intrinsic beauties of
water-colour. Yet it is not mere colour as colour that he gives us, not
the cheap and arbitrary and mechanical splendour of merely decorative
art. The colour is delicate and subtle, full of surprises, and as varied
as nature herself; it is controlled and marshalled by the authority of
the tone scheme; it is nature grasped by human intelligence, and made
obedient to its organising power. And a large part of the attractiveness
of these drawings is due to the ease and grace with which the reign of
purpose and intelligence is maintained.
After all it is the marvellous technical skill which they display which
is the essence of the charm of these works. The subject-matter counts
for less than the execution, the objects portrayed are less eloquent
than the sense of freedom, mastery and real happiness evident in the
artist’s work. He wanted nothing beyond this; the work to him was not a
symbol of something higher,--it did not point beyond itself. It was at
once means and end, process and fulfilment, work and reward, the toil of
life and its consummated bliss.
The intrinsic poverty of the subject-matter no doubt serves to
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXIX_
APPROACH TO VENICE: SUNSET
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1839]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXX_
RIVA DEGLI SCHIAVONI, FROM NEAR THE PUBLIC GARDENS
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1839]
intensify what I may call the material beauty of the workmanship. Yet we
must beware of ranking this subject-matter too low. It is not mere
sensuous feeling, it is not entirely devoid of the element of thought.
The conscious action of thought is probably entirely absent. The scenes
float before us in all the bareness of immediate sensation. They give us
nothing more than a moment of immediate experience caught, as it were,
on the wing, and pinned down all quivering with life. But the momentary
experience is that of a man whose visual sensations have been organised
by a life-time of strenuous intellectual control. The brain and the
senses are but the organs of one function. There is not a single
definite thought present, the artist has sunk himself in the flow of the
merely animal life, yet his naked sentience is conditioned through and
through and characterised by the pervasive activity of the mind.
To transfix a fleeting moment of immediate living experience is a very
different thing from the deliberate analysis of the process of
perception and the wilful abstraction of one of its elements. In other
words, this work of Turner is essentially different in kind from the
work of the modern Impressionists. The Impressionist adopts the methods
of science. He operates on his perceptions, and cuts away this element
and that, and in the end presents you with a dead and potted
psychological abstraction, a diagram of the ‘pure’ visual sensation,
which delights us with its ingenuity and neatness, but which no one
would take for a fragment of the living flow of thought and emotion
which all concrete experience is. Impressionism is cold and heartless;
it is merely intellectual and ratiocinative, and therefore essentially
inartistic. But the so-called impressionistic work of Turner, in spite
of its other defects and shortcomings, remains ever in the flood of
concrete living experience. It is never abstract; it never loses its
emotional contagion, though its emotional suggestiveness is somewhat
vague and indefinite. Its power of evoking emotion is very strongly
pronounced, but the emotions it calls up are sadly lacking in
definition, and seem to lie very much at the mercy of chance
associations.
The cause of this vagueness and emptiness is no doubt closely connected
with Turner’s triumphant grasp of the fleeting momentary experience.
His work is almost, though not quite, as empty and indeterminate as an
isolated fragment of immediate sensation. A single steady look by a cool
observer would grasp more of the character of a given scene than we find
in these sketches. But the time occupied in a steady look at a scene is
too long for Turner; though the look should last but half a minute the
mind has time to grasp and organise the sensuous data. Turner’s object
is to catch these data of sense in their least organised condition. To
do this, he must reduce the time of contact between the scene and his
senses to its shortest possible extent. Some of the later Impressionists
have found that merely to open and shut the eyes gives their senses and
intelligence too long an exposure; they have therefore devised a
mechanical instrument which they hold in front of their eyes, and which
operates very much like a shutter used for taking instantaneous
photographs. In this way they obtain a glimpse of a scene of shorter
duration than the most rapid opening and shutting of the eyes can give.
We have no reason for suspecting that Turner had recourse to any such
mechanical aids, but he achieved similar results. He gives us the
momentary bedazzlement of the sunlight, and, within this impression, a
confused and fragmentary perception of objects. The objects seen are
hardly recognisable, their attributes are reduced to a minimum, and the
blur of living emotion which forms part of such rudimentary perception
is reduced to its lowest terms. The control such sketches exercise over
the thoughts and feelings of the spectator is therefore small and
possesses very little individuality.
But even Venice soon palled upon Turner’s imagination. He seemed
desirous of getting away as far as possible from the disturbing
influences of human association. Only among the lonely valleys and
mountain tops of Switzerland could his perturbed and wearied spirit find
something like the peace he sought so feverishly. Even here he shrank
from the common light of ordinary day. He loved the solemn stillness of
night, and would wait to surprise the first rosy hues of dawn upon Mount
Pilatus or the Rigi. His sympathies are all with the silent and primary
things of nature.
It is as though he were seeking to strip himself of the attributes
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXXI_
FREIBURG: THE DESCENT FROM THE HOTEL DE VILLE
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1841]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXXXII_
RUINED CASTLE ON ROCK
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1841]
of humanity, to sink into the unconscious vegetative life of nature.
Even when roused to activity his mind seems curiously dehumanised. When
he draws for us the towers and churches of a place like Freiburg we seem
to be looking at the work of a disembodied spirit. The city is divested
of all its human associations. His eye seems now to classify and arrange
what it sees in terms of space and motion, much as we should imagine an
eagle to look down upon the welter and turmoil of our lives. I get the
same impression from the ‘Village and Castle on the Rhine’ (82, N.G.),
and ‘The Via Mala’ (73, N.G.).
In all this, in this gradual impoverishment of mind and feeling, it is
difficult to discover anything more than the silent and inevitable
ravages of old age. But it is not their poverty of content that makes
these later drawings of Turner so remarkable. It is the virile and
glorious artistic skill which only flames the brighter amid the decay of
all Turner’s other faculties. The man was dead before the incomparable
master of tone and colour was exhausted. It is this curious combination
of an unexhausted special aptitude with a moribund mentality that gives
this later work of Turner its uniqueness, its lurid and uncanny
fascination. In the whole history of pictorial art we have never had
before quite the same display of senile apathy gilded and transfigured
by the dying shafts of an incommensurable natural capacity.
* * * * *
By the time Turner was seventy years of age his bodily infirmities
prevented him from visiting Switzerland. For a year or two we find him
haunting the coast of Normandy, about Dieppe, Eu and Ambleteuse. Then he
is unable to cross the Channel. For a short season he flits about Sussex
and Kent--at Folkestone, Margate, Deal, and Sandwich--and then there is
silence.