1834: AGED FIFTY-NINE
SOME OLD STORIES AND SOME AGELESS COLOUR STUDIES
Turner, in his sixtieth year, is on the threshold of the period when
colour and light were more and more to obsess him to the exclusion of
form and detail. In the _Inventory_, there are books labelled simply
'Colour Studies,' and among the water-colours connected with his
'Meuse-Moselle-Rhine' tour are some bearing such suggestive titles as
'Crimson Ruins,' 'Vermilion Towers,' 'Tower in Sunbeam,' 'Blue Hills,'
'Ruins with Rainbow.' In the 'Colour Studies' Sketch-Book there are
nearly fifty pages described merely as 'Colour Sketches'; and on the
last page are several lines of illegible verse. Also, after a sketch of
a 'Ruined Castle on a Rock' a recipe 'said to be an infallible cure for
the bite of a mad dog.'
In the 'Oxford and Bruges' Sketch-Book he breaks into this:--
'Old Tom, of Christ Church, Oxford. What? is it you Old Tom that keep
this row every night? What? is it right that _you_ should summon us to
bed at nine continually all the year round? Is it fair that you, Tom,
should thus deal with us every night?'
With my mind full of the visionary Turner, the dreamer and the troubled
traveller, I am a little impatient of 'The Golden Bough' of this year;
so apparently were the trustees of the National Gallery, as they
banished it to Dublin. As to 'St. Michael's Mount,' now in the Victoria
and Albert Museum, how beautiful would be the pale gold Mount, rising
from a pale gold shore into a grey-blue sky, if the foreground with its
fish and figures, boat and lobster-pots, could be banished. The fine
and whirling spectacle of the 'Fire at Sea,' that looks so well in its
new home at Millbank, was composed, no doubt, from 'The Fire at Sea'
Sketch-Book, which has this endorsement by Ruskin: 'A careless book:
the fine ships on fire taken out of it and very little left.'
He exhibited another Venice subject this year, probably the Venice
about which Thornbury tells a story: how the inevitable Jones, who
was showing a picture with a blue sky in it, tried to paint his sky
brighter, so as to make it outshine Turner's, which hung alongside.
Turner then made his sky still more blue, whereupon Jones painted out
his blue sky altogether and put in a white one.
'Ah! Jones,' said Turner, 'you've done me now.'
Here may be told once again the story of the encounter between Gillott
the pen manufacturer and Turner, in Thornbury's own words:--
We are told that one day Mr. Gillott, the well-known manufacturer of
Birmingham, sallied forth from his hotel, determined at any price to
obtain admission to the enchanted house in Queen Anne Street. He was
rich, he was enthusiastic--he believed strongly in the power of the
golden key to open any door. He arrived at the blistered dirty door of
the house with the black-crusted windows. He pulled at the bell; the
bell answered with a querulous, melancholy tinkle. There was a long
inhospitable pause; then an old woman with a diseased face looked up
from the area, and presently ascended and tardily opened the door,
keeping the filthy chain up, however, as a precaution. She snappishly
asked Mr. Gillott's business. He told her in his blandest voice. "Can't
let 'e in," was the answer, and she tried to slam the door. But during
the parley the crafty and determined Dives had put his foot in, and
now, refusing to any longer parley, he pushed past the feeble, enraged
old she-Cerberus, and hurried upstairs to the gallery. In a moment
Turner was out upon him like a spider on another spider who has invaded
his web. Mr. Gillott bowed, introduced himself, and stated that he had
come to buy. "Don't want to sell," or some such rebuff, was the answer;
but Gillott shut his ears to all Turner's angry vituperations. "Have
you ever seen our Birmingham pictures, Mr. Turner?" was his only remark.
'"Never 'eard of 'em," said Turner.
'Gillott pulled from his pocket a silvery fragile bundle of Birmingham
bank-notes (about £5000 worth).
'"Mere paper," said Turner, with grim humour, a little softened, and
enjoying the joke.
'"To be bartered for _mere_ canvas," said Gillott, waving his hand at
the "Building of Carthage" and its companions.
'"You're a rum fellow!" said Turner, slowly entering into negotiations,
which ended in Gillott eventually carrying off in his cab some five
thousand pounds' worth of Turner's pictures.'
These old stories, when one has heard them once, are not very
exhilarating, but they all have truth in their well of words. It is
pleasant to turn from them, and merely to repeat the titles of some of
the sketches mentioned before, sounding as beautiful as they look, and
to glance at such a delicate drawing as the 'View on the Moselle,' and
to follow the river feeling for its level between the flushed hills.
And it is pleasant, too, to know that the time has now come to consider
the loveliest of the 'unfinished' oils, the pictures painted for his
own delight in moments of exhilaration, that were revealed to the
public in 1906. It is probable that the most delicate and evanescent of
them were painted at intervals between this year and 1838. Unsigned,
unnamed, undated, it is impossible to give them a certain date, and
really it does not much matter. Turner painted them; the nation has
them: that is all we need to know.
PART SEVEN
1833-1845
FROM A CONSIDERATION OF THE 'UNFINISHED OILS TO' RAIN, STEAM AND SPEED'
AND THE LAST SKETCH-BOOKS