1832: AGED FIFTY-SEVEN
HE PAINTS 'CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE' AND IS JOCULAR ON VARNISHING DAY
'... and now, fair Italy!
Thou art the garden of the world,
Even in thy desert what is like to thee?'
This, the beginning of an extract from Byron, accompanied his 'Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage'--that late golden afternoon, Italy basking in
the heat haze. The stone pine has been mercilessly criticised; but
although that useful tree and the foreground pictures are carelessly
painted, how beautiful is the horse-shoe bend of the placid river, and
the suffused light on ruin, convent, walled town, and distant hills,
illumined from the sun sinking behind the mountains.
There is a story connected with two of his other pictures of this
year, 'Helvoetsluys--the City of Utrecht, 'Going to Sea,' and that
impossible work with the unwieldy title illustrating Shadrach, Meshach
and Abednego coming forth from the burning fiery furnace. Turner
asked George Jones, R.A., what he intended to paint for the ensuing
exhibition. 'Oh!' said Jones, 'the Fiery Furnace, with Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednego.' 'A good subject,' said Turner, 'I'll do it also.'
In the exhibition Jones's picture of 'The Fiery Furnace' was placed
opposite to Turner's grey 'Helvoetsluys,' and next to Constable's 'The
Opening of Waterloo Bridge.' Turner, who had been watching Constable
brightening the flags and decorations of his city barges with vermilion
and lake, realised that the flutter of colour was making his own grey
picture look insignificant. Suddenly he put a round daub of red lead,
somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, and departed without
a word. The intensity of the red lead caused even the vermilion and
lake of Constable to look weak.
When Constable saw the red lead he said--'Turner has been here and
fired off a gun.' 'A coal,' cried Cooper, 'has bounced across the room
from Jones's "Fiery Furnace," and set fire to Turner's sea.' The great
man did not visit the room for a day and a half; then, in the last
moments that were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he
had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy.
Constable, according to Thornbury, was secretly very severe on Turner's
pictures, which does not tally with his spoken and written enthusiasm.
Little did Constable, or any one else, realise the work that Turner
was yet to do. In the following year, at the age of fifty-eight, he
exhibited his first Venetian picture--Venice--that was to absorb and
haunt him, and inspire some of the most lovely visions of his ageing
eyes.